Rictus
by Sequitur
Summary: How Tony Dinozzo started working for NCIS.
1. Chapter I

Rictus

* * *

"How did you get into NCIS?"

"I smiled?"

- Kate and Tony, "Hung Out to Dry"

* * *

**Chapter I**

Ellie Lacher was six; the daughter of a Navy lieutenant commander. She was wearing a faded yellow sundress and battered, grass-stained sandals.

Tony knelt in the slowly-drying mud and snapped a photo of the way Ellie's pretty dress had been pushed up around her hips. He framed her heart-shaped, freckled face with his camera and shot those glassy blue eyes and pinkish lips twice, making sure that the angle was enough to catch the bruises on her neck. He didn't need directions to know what to record: he had worked too many dead kids in other cities, and this wasn't the worst body he had ever seen. That honor had gone to a three-year-old named Kyle he had found in Philly, who had been sliced to pieces and spread out over the alley like so much garbage. He had been fine until he had seen the Campbell's chicken soup can in one of the sticky stretches of blood. He'd thought, _It's like a Warhol painting_, and then he had been down for the count, on his knees and puking on someone's doorstep.

Compared to Kyle, Ellie had died gracefully. In her pretty yellow dress, she looked like nothing so much as a sunflower trod into the ground.

Lucas was white-lipped, moving around the perimeter and chewing out witnesses indiscriminately, and Tony let the passing diatribe go over his head. Everyone was going to be snappish today. He looked down at the body again and took another picture, no longer sure what he was capturing but hoping to record a little of this senselessness, give in to one blurry photo out of an otherwise perfect roll.

After the brightness of the flash cleared, he saw that he had photographed a wide angle of the girl's body, and knew that it was a perfect picture, one that would never be seen as anything but intentional. Somehow, it made him feel sour.

Lucas was already there, and bristling. "The feds are here."

Tony tugged his sunglasses down, as if his incredulity could only be conveyed through direct eye-contact. The glare bit at him, his pupils became pinpricks, and Lucas became one shadowy figure on a dark canvas. This wasn't his day for pulling off a gesture, significant or otherwise.

"You're kidding me. FBI?"

"Did I say it was the fucking FBI, Dinozzo? I said it was the feds. Lacher called in NCIS. We've got some bastard at the tape with his M.E., and they want in. Go do your thing."

He had become the unofficial go-between for any departmental rivalries since he had made the mistake of landing himself in charge of their only hostage negotiation that year. Apparently the brass thought that anyone who could charm gunmen into releasing a few civilians could probably soothe whatever feathers happened to get ruffled in the line of duty. By now, he'd been immersed in so many bureaucratic squabbles that he preferred men who would rather shoot than talk, and he'd told the Captain as much, not like that had earned him any brownie points. All it had gotten him was a long-winded speech about how they all had to do their part, and how if Tony could talk, he was going to have to talk until he went hoarse, because that's how they were going to use him.

And use him they did, at every opportunity. Lucas hadn't been slow to catch on to his partner's talent, and had started foisting him off on interviews at every opportunity. Ellie Lacher was Tony's first chance to work a real scene in a week, and if it had been any other death, any other type of victim, he would have broken into a victory dance right next to the corpse.

As is, he wasn't dancing, but he was going to hang on to this case. He sure as hell wasn't going to drop it to go "do his thing" with the Navy cops, just because Lucas, having passed off the unpleasant task of photographing the body, wanted to collect the remaining publicity glory.

"I'm busy," he said shortly.

"Come on, Tony."

"Not the most persuasive argument I've ever heard. Besides," he said, crouching down to peer at the shape of a footprint in the mud, "they have valid jurisdiction. You want to be the one to tell Lacher that we sent his boys away just because you wanted to mark your territory?"

"Lacher's grieving," Lucas said. "He doesn't want anything besides his daughter's killer locked up. Who gets the job done isn't important to him."

"Shouldn't be important to us, either."

He kept his tone flippant, but he could feel himself losing the argument. They were both right, and it boiled down to being a lot more complicated than his own issues about being used as Homicide's trained talking monkey, but what was important was that the job was finished off, and neatly. If Lucas tried to talk to NCIS, he'd start a turf war that would probably cost them their share in the case. Besides, it felt petty and a little cruel, fighting like vultures over this particular type of carrion.

"You owe me one," he said to Lucas, and stood. He put the sunglasses back on, not so much to dampen the brightness but more to hide his eyes from the men he'd have to chat with. "I'm going to split the jurisdiction with them. No sense playing hardball right now. Lacher wants them, we can work with them."

"More work for you," Lucas said lightly.

"Yeah, I'll take one for the team and play nice. Don't forget, though, you're senior. You're the one the brass is going to blame if I fuck up."

Leaving Lucas with that unpleasant caveat, he turned and walked to the tape, sliding back into the real world again. He could feel Nice Guy Tony settling around him like a second skin, a smile already beginning to curve his mouth, but he suppressed it, turned it into a straight line. Nice didn't mean stupid.

He found them being stalled some distance from the scene, a nervous freckled kid in a uniform trying to talk fast enough to get them in circles. It wasn't working, Tony noticed to his amusement. Freckles wasn't in danger of becoming anybody's go-between. Unfortunately, his distinct failure meant that these would be two very pissed-off men by the time Tony got to them, and he probably wouldn't be able to use any of the one-liners in his usual bag of tricks. Besides, either way, these two didn't look like they'd fall for any of it. The agent with the godawful hair cut might as well have been made out of steel, and even the M.E. looked as if he'd cheerfully dice Freckles apart with a scalpel at the slightest provocation.

Lucas was going to regret sending Tony over. If these guys were smart - - and they looked like they were - - Tony was going to have to give them more than some lip-service in the name of cooperation. He had the nasty feeling that he wasn't going to end up with the lion's share of this investigation.

He scared Freckles off by flashing his shield; the kid bolted like a rabbit into the safety of the crowd, eager to get back to his car. Tony grinned after him - - that was what they got, sending a rookie to do a man's job - - and then swung his shield around to meet up with the face of Steely Dan.

Old Steely raised his own badge in response. Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs. Tony decided that it wouldn't really be politick to say anything at all about the man's name. A crease had appeared in his forehead when he'd seen Tony's eyes lingering on the ID, and Tony thought that he had probably heard it all before. And if Tony couldn't be original, he wasn't going to try at all.

"This is Dr. Mallard," Gibbs said, jerking his head at the M.E. He nodded at Tony. "Detective."

"All right, I'm guessing that you had all the pleasantries you could stand from Freckles, so let me move on to business." Gibbs didn't exactly break out in a jig, but he made a grunt that was probably agreement, so Tony counted it as a victory. "You want the body. You have jurisdiction. I'm not going to try and stop you from taking it. I just photographed that little girl from head to toe and I am _so _not in the mood to play tennis with you for her body."

"That's . . . refreshingly noble of you," Mallard said. He looked as if Tony were a particularly interesting new specimen of humanity.

Tony, who found that more than a little creepy, continued. "But I've got a condition."

Gibbs said, "Doesn't everyone?"

"The body's yours, the case is yours," Tony said, "and I'll defer to you, but I want to be included."

Gibbs just looked at him. Tony looked back, but couldn't match the concentration of that stare. Gibbs was stripping away his defenses, flaying him alive. It made him want to cringe away and curl up to hide his belly from that splitting gaze: it was just too damned invasive, like every little sin was breaking out on his skin. He kept his head up, as if this didn't bother him, and hoped this wouldn't turn into a staring contest. Tony had a tendency to blink.

It was a hundred years before Gibbs nodded. "Fine. But just you. Not your partner."

He thought of Lucas pacing and snarling. Lucas had a daughter named Marie - - Tony had played with her at his first department barbecue, when, as the rookie, he'd been assigned to babysitting duty. She'd roped him into playing marbles squatting down on the hot basketball court. Cute little girl. Lucas would want a piece of the case because it could have just as easily been Marie lying in the mud, all tangled up in her pretty Sunday clothes.

"No deal," Tony said. "He'll want this."

"It's not a negotiation, Dinozzo," Gibbs said. "If it comes down to a turf war, we have the edge. You're included at my discretion. You screw up, you're out. You piss me off, you're also out."

It was hard to argue with that particular brand of illogical logic, and Tony shut his mouth. He wasn't sure how far he could push Gibbs, who hadn't warmed to him like Mallard. Gibbs didn't look as if he'd been at all impressed by Tony's fancy verbal footwork - - he had accepted Tony's offer of cooperation simply to take the path of least resistance. It wasn't like there was a downside to having Tony tagging along: Gibbs would have quick and easy access to the case findings, control of the crime scene, and someone to boss around. Tony got to see it through. It should have been easy to decide that he just wouldn't put up with this guy if things turned to shit, and it should have been easy to walk away and let Gibbs negotiate with someone else, someone who wouldn't pull their punches for the sake of justice and an ill-matched sense of camaraderie, but it wasn't. It was pretty damned difficult, actually.

Gibbs was a little closer to him now, as if to make sure that the full force of his presence was becoming clear to Tony. "You got that, Dinozzo? There's the deal. Are you in or are you out?"

Tony swallowed and decided that he definitely wasn't in control of this situation at all. Well, this miserable failure, at least, ought to convince people that he wasn't the ideal go-between.

"For now I'm in," Tony said, "since you asked so nicely."

He held out his hand and Gibbs matched the gesture. Shaking hands with Mallard was more pleasant, a little less like having your strength tested by one of those old-time carnival machines. The doctor actually smiled at him in a bemused fashion, and Tony found himself smiling back.

He lifted his camera for Gibbs. They might as well have a temporary truce. "I took pictures. You want to look them over, see if there's anything else I need to snap?"

Gibbs gave the small silver camera a distinctly mistrustful glance, and Tony had the unsettling feeling that he'd picked the wrong way to go about a truce.

"Is that digital?"

"Uh, yeah. Problem?"

He couldn't help being a little smug. The way Gibbs was eyeing the poor thing, it might as well have been a cobra poised to strike him. Tony ran his thumb across the surface as if petting it, and gave Gibbs a small smile that almost felt friendly. So the bastard had a weakness after all - - one the two of them had in common, most of the time. Tony wasn't exactly stuck in the Dark Ages, but he still typed two-fingered and his main computer experience came from online poker and free porn.

"If you're going to be working for me, Dinozzo," Gibbs said, taking the camera gingerly in his hands, "learn to take some real pictures."

His sense of common ground seemed to disintegrate underneath him, replaced with a sharp, pointed bitterness. Of all the arrogant, bull-headed - -

"I'm working _with _you. Not _for _you. This is a cooperative investigation, and you are sure as hell not my boss. I said I'd defer. I didn't say I'd lick your shoes. Don't treat me like one of your agents."

Gibbs's answering smile surprised him. "Wouldn't dream of it, Dinozzo."

* * *

"I must say, Jethro, I'm quite surprised. That young man didn't have any particular leverage over you, why allow him to share the investigation?"

Gibbs concentrated on Dinozzo's photographs. The detective had a good eye, Gibbs had to grudgingly admit - - the careful visual reconstructions of the body were as much art as science. The sketches skewed a little towards interpretive, and Gibbs was less than forgiving on whimsy guiding an investigation, but it was interesting seeing someone else revealed in simple pencil lines. Interesting, as long as it wasn't him. Still, looking at Dinozzo's sketches, even though they had been given freely, felt oddly personal, and he threw them onto the bed and stuck to the photos, instead.

Ducky was rearranging the hotel curtains, shifting the neat beige flaps into order. "You were impressed by his tenacity, no doubt."

"You want to tell me about the body, Duck?"

Ducky sat down, his hands folded over his knees. "Nothing that you haven't seen, unfortunately. Our young lady was sexually assaulted before her death."

"COD?"

"Strangulation. Someone's hands, no doubt. I measured the marks, perhaps if we found a suspect you might be able to match the grip size . . ."

Gibbs tossed the photos aside in disgust. "We don't _have _any suspects. And Abby can't run a grip size through the system. Lacher can't think of anyone holding a grudge. There's a chance we're looking at a random abduction."

They both knew all too well what it would mean if the case turned out to have been one unconnected to a motive. Random meant that they would have no place to start looking, and that they would likely finish without having found anything. They were working in the dark. His least favorite method of operations.

"Perhaps Detective Dinozzo could help you," Ducky said delicately.

It wasn't an unreasonable option. This was Dinozzo's home, not theirs - - Dinozzo would know of any sex offenders in the area and he certainly would have the connections that they lacked. But Gibbs had a headache from too many hours of going over the same pictures and he wasn't in the mood to ask for help. He glanced at the clock, and the glowing numbers showed that it was three in the morning. He and Ducky had been doing this for hours now. The sudden tiredness gave him an idea of what he _was _in the mood for. And if the downside of it meant that he'd be asking for help, well, that was something he'd have to endure. It would be worth it.

He yanked Abby's fax out of the mess of papers and jabbed at it. The type seemed impossibly small, and he had to squint at the numbers, which Ducky judiciously ignored.

"It _is _rather early, Jethro," Ducky said as he reached for the phone. "It might wait until morning."

"It'll keep him on his toes. Teach him to roll with the punches. And all of that other cliché crap."

"But mainly," Ducky said, "you'd like to wake him up."

"Well, yeah."

The phone only rang once before Dinozzo's voice, not at all sleepy, answered.

"Gotta be Special Agent Gibbs," Dinozzo said without waiting for him to start the conversation, "because anybody else would at least stall until the sun came up." Gibbs couldn't think of anything to say to that, feeling like he'd just been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, and Dinozzo grew more hesitant in the silence. "Lucas? Hey, Lucas, man, I'm sorry."

It was the same niggling, doubtful feeling he'd had when he'd been looking at Dinozzo's sketches.

"Right the first time, Dinozzo," he said, shaking it off. "Let me guess. Partner not happy with you?"

"I got him tossed from the damn investigation," Dinozzo said, "how happy would you be? He's not sending me flowers. What do you want?"

"Do you have your photos in front of you?"

"I'm not up this late playing Parcheesi. I like to be in someone's bed by now."

"Someone's?"

He could _hear _Dinozzo grinning, he knew it and hated it. He could just see the detective leaning back in his chair, feet planted on the desk, and that stupid, shit-eating, impossibly good-spirited grin on his face.

"If it's a good night, I'm not going to be in mine, am I? And again, what do you want?"

"A list of registered sex offenders in the area."

He heard Dinozzo shuffling papers. "You got a fax machine? Hey, am I going to get a copy of Dr. Mallard's report or do I have to get down and beg for it? Sharing is the name of the game, Gibbs."

"COD is strangulation, rape came back positive. No semen."

"Thanks for the Cliff Notes, really, but despite what you might have heard from my high school English teachers, I actually like to read the full version. Get me a copy. All right, I've got your list, but none of these guys live in Lacher's neighborhood, and that would be the best way to notice Ellie. Nobody living in the blocks next to her school, either. There's a chance that our guy is a newbie."

"Fax me the list anyway."

"Fax me the coroner's report."

Gibbs snorted. "Dinozzo, get your ass down here in fifteen minutes with all your notes and you can have whatever you want."

"Breakfast on your expense account?"

He laughed despite himself. "Get your ass down here," he said again, and hung up.

On the phone, Dinozzo had become someone who had always gotten everything he'd ever wanted, and Gibbs had to think back carefully to remember the tenser lines the young man had had in person, the way his mouth had tightened as he'd surrendered his camera. That, and the way Dinozzo had uncertainly said his partner's name, apologizing. At least the detective had instincts enough to give himself some substance under all the superficial charm.

"He's an interesting young man, isn't he?"

"Interesting's one word for it," Gibbs said. "Smart-ass is another. I don't want to talk about Detective Dinozzo, I want to talk about Ellie Lacher. Did you find anything else on the body?"

"A few stray black threads," Ducky said, shrugging. "I had them sealed and sent to the local lab, but black threads are almost as hard to trace as white cotton. Although I do recall an elderly woman strangled with a woolen scarf once. She _inhaled _some of the stray particles and they were eventually tied to the scarf her nephew had been keeping as a trophy. It seems that she passed him over in selection of an heir, an odd thing, since she wasn't particularly wealthy by any account, but I suppose murders have been committed for less . . ."

"Black threads," Gibbs said, disgusted. "And no suspects. If this guy gets cocky, we're looking at a second victim. Dinozzo had better give us something good."

"What do you expect him to have?"

"I don't know, but it better be worth the price of his breakfast."


	2. Chapter II

Thank you all very much for your feedback - - it's really encouraging. I'm trying to walk the delicate borderline between the two of them starting to respect each other and becoming saccharine, so if I stray into the mushy territory, please warn me. Lucas's appearance in the next chapter should cause a few problems, of course . . . but for now, he's safely off-screen.

* * *

**Chapter II**

One day, Gibbs decided, he would find a way to work with people who would be genetically unable to hold an intelligent conversation about croissants.

Dinozzo had taken over the spare bed and lay on his stomach nibbling at pastries while he read over spread-out police reports and occasionally threw comments over his shoulder about various arrests made in Lacher's neighborhood, which at least made more sense than the occasional remark to Ducky about the quality of different types of crepes. He had an unerring sense of timing, because every time Gibbs's fingers were starting to itch to smack him with a rolled-up file like a naughty puppy, he would turn around and say that there had been a peeping tom reported two blocks from Ellie's house, and they could maybe check that out in the morning.

At eight, Gibbs grabbed the do-not-disturb sign. "Ducky, get some sleep. Dinozzo, you're with me." He eyed the detective as he stood, legs shaky as a fawn's, and his eyes narrowed. "You awake?"

Dinozzo rubbed ineffectively at his eyes. "Mm. Probably."

"Keep up or stay in the car," Gibbs warned him as they moved into the hallway. He kept his eyes on the elevator at the end of the corridor; the diamond-pattern of the burgundy carpet was making him dizzy. "I don't have time to babysit." Dinozzo's eye-rolling was so dramatic that Gibbs could almost hear it, but he ignored it - - if Dinozzo could stay on his feet for twenty-four hours straight, he could ham it up all he wanted. "We'll check out your peeping tom first."

"Because the best way to start the morning is to interview a sweaty-palmed pervert with a pair of binoculars who reminds you every three minutes that he has a brother who's a lawyer."

Gibbs winced at the description and reconsidered the day plan. "Feel better starting it with coffee?"

"Knew you were all bark and no bite," Dinozzo said, and just for that, Gibbs made him buy the coffee for both of them, which at least wiped the smartass grin off his face. Dinozzo popped the lid off his cup and somehow managed to add three packets of sugar without spilling it all over himself. Gibbs at least had to admire the technique, if not the taste. Dinozzo sipped with raised eyebrows, pulled the cup away, and peered at it. "Huh. This kind of tastes like coffee."

Gibbs drank. "Not bad."

"You ever had hotel coffee that tasted like coffee?" Dinozzo continued staring at the waxed cup with a distinctly mistrustful look. "I don't think I want this. There has to be something wrong with it."

He dropped it in the nearest trashcan on their way out and got a Mountain Dew out of the vending machine.

* * *

Thirty seconds into the drive, Tony was grateful that he'd picked a vending machine with bottles instead of cans, because without the option of sealing his drink, he would have had citrus-flavored clothes before Gibbs had made it out of the parking lot. He settled for clenching white-knuckled hands around his knees and trying to remember whether he had ever cleaned up his will and testament after the move. If he had stuck it in the closet along with his old tennis racket, it would probably take an archaeological expedition to unearth it, and all of his money would end up going to Jews for Jesus, or the YMCA.

Thinking about the will at least distracted him from thinking about Gibbs, who had apparently decided that Tony was all right for late night study parties but was obviously supposed to stay quiet in the car and _not _reach for the radio. Tony rolled his shoulders back into the seat and thought, suddenly, of Lucas.

It had been messy when he had gotten back to his partner last night. He'd known that Lucas would be pissed about being excluded from the investigation, but being pissed had only been round one and Lucas played to the knock-out blow. Tony had taken it, too, because . . . well, Lucas was at least a part-time friend and definitely a full-time partner, and Tony should have been able to get him in. With Gibbs, during the nearly one-sided negotiation process, Tony had felt that he was chipping away at some kind of granite inside the NCIS agent, earning a little respect just for having the balls to stick with it and that good sense to back down where someone else was going to have to play the alpha wolf, and it had felt good. Yeah, Gibbs had pretty much been a bastard so far, but he had also obviously been a bastard who knew what he was doing, and Tony could respect that. But the point, at least from Lucas's side, was that Tony had traded a partnership of nearly two years for the chance to take on a hard sell Navy cop, and when the dust cleared, it was as good a reason as any for Lucas to get angry.

Other than the chance to see the case closed up and maybe get to tighten the cuffs on the guy who had raped and killed Ellie Lacher, the only other plus Tony could see to his Faustian bargain was that maybe people would stop asking him to do all the talking.

He took another shot at Gibbs. "Lucas would be able to help us. You. Whatever."

He practically heard the rubber peeling off the tires as Gibbs stopped for the light. "I told you when you signed up, Dinozzo, that it was a one-man deal." He ticked his fingers against the wheel irritably, waiting. "I didn't stop by to pick up homicide detectives in bulk just because there was a discount."

The light went green and Tony had to hold on to his drink again.

"So you don't want to let too many cooks into the kitchen? You're thinking that one guy with a vendetta beats out an assigned team working around the clock?"

"Actually," Gibbs said, "I was thinking that an NCIS agent and a homicide detective with an ME and two labs in their name ought to be able to find a murderer without having to rely on someone else to tie their shoelaces, Dinozzo, that's what I was thinking. But the one guy with a vendetta sounds like it could work, so either shut the hell up or sit this one out."

Tony replayed that monologue in his head for a minute or so, sucking little drops of liquid off the threads of the Mountain Dew cap.

"God," he said finally. "You must be hell to work for."

"I've been told."

It was like trying to get a straight answer out of a cryptograph, Tony thought irritably, and watched as Gibbs barely missed the chance to pay for some BMW's bodywork. Maybe that was why Gibbs had only come with Mallard in tow - - because his agents would have picked leprosy over time in a hotel room with their boss. He thought about it, but if he asked that question, he wouldn't find out anything, either. He'd be better off quizzing the doctor, who at least seemed to like him. But one thing still bugged him: if Gibbs was so dead set against allowing Lucas or anyone else to tag along and help, why had he let Tony do the same thing? Oh, sure, Tony had the connections, but Gibbs had things like court orders and one hell of a glare, and could probably have been dealt all the cards in Tony's hand eventually.

Maybe he was just impatient. Or maybe it was all lip-service in the name of agency cooperation.

Or maybe Tony was doing something right. He liked that theory better. It inclined him to be a little more forgiving towards Gibbs's occasional moments of complete bastardry, if Gibbs actually liked him.

"Why isn't your team with you?" he asked, and the question that would have been him being a jackass a few minutes ago now came out sounding surprisingly friendly.

"Don't have much of one, at the moment," Gibbs said, and while he didn't sound friendly, he at least sounded calmer. "I just had one agent transfer and I had to leave the other behind to satisfy protocol." He had stopped the car before Tony had even realized that they were in someone's driveway. Gibbs yanked the keys out of the ignition and turned, raised his eyebrows at Tony. "Bet you thought I just pissed them all off, huh?"

"Not exactly," Tony said. He undid his seatbelt and changed the subject. "You've been in town before."

"Once or twice."

"It takes me more than a couple of visits to learn a street grid," Tony said.

The sunlight outside made his head ache, and he wished he'd brought his sunglasses with him. He turned his head, waiting for an answer from Gibbs, but they'd apparently segued back into Complete Bastard and Complete Jackass, because Gibbs was already setting the pace for Max Prestor's front door. He sighed, jogged to catch up, and managed to skid onto the porch before Gibbs rang the doorbell.

"You never struck me as a doorbell kind of guy."

"Thought I'd shoot out the lock?"

"It crossed my mind."

No one answered, and Gibbs flattened his hand against the bell. "He doesn't answer in the next thirty seconds, it'll do more than cross your mind, Dinozzo." His hand fell back from the door and tightened into a fist at his side, but Tony wouldn't have needed the visual to get the point. It was about the little things: the way the muscles in his jaw had tightened, the way the end of Tony's name had become more of a snarl, even the way his fingers had twitched when he'd drawn them into that oh-so-obvious fist.

This stuff was why he pulled off undercover, why they used him for all the talking jobs. He saw things. He didn't always understand them, but he saw them, and most of the time that was enough. Profiling was about being able to extrapolate understanding from seeing almost nothing; what Tony did was about noticing everything and then getting a good idea by default. He needed more information, but it still got the job done. He hadn't needed Gibbs to be obvious.

He raised his hand and smacked the door so hard that it rattled in the frame. "Mr. Prestor! Baltimore Homicide, open up!"

The yellowed blinds moved a fraction of an inch.

Gibbs nodded. "Not bad, Dinozzo."

Tony grinned. "I learned a long time ago that mentioning murder makes things go a lot faster."

Max Prestor was a skinny guy with Coke bottle glasses and so many freckles that Tony's fingers itched for an ink pen to connect the dots. He kept his hands planted against the doorframe, playing scarecrow, as if Gibbs and Tony couldn't push past him and snap his arms like twigs if they wanted.

"I don't know anything about a homicide," Prestor said.

Gibbs showed his badge in one quick, open-close snap. "Special Agent Gibbs, NCIS. Detective Dinozzo, Homicide." A sleight of hand movement that Tony couldn't quite track, Gibbs's hand disappeared into his jacket again and brought out a photograph of Ellie Lacher. Tony didn't recognize it as one of the crime scene shots: Ellie was clearly alive and smiling in this. A school photo, lit up by a blue background. "Do you recognize this girl?"

Prestor raised his chin. "Nope."

"I don't know, Gibbs," Tony said offhandedly. "We might be wasting our time here. I told you, this guy just got off on watching the pretty girls through their bedroom windows. Nothing wrong there."

"It'd be a pretty big escalation," Gibbs said. "Unless . . . how old were the girls, Dinozzo?"

Tony raised his hands and shrugged, flashing the smile this time at Max. "Not sure. Wasn't my case. I mean, after all, Max here didn't kill anyone."

"Unless he did."

"Right, unless he did, because someone who sneaks around outside a house last night and presses his nose to a window so he can watch strangers stripping down for bed might just be screwed-up enough to rape a little girl not even out of a kindergarten yet and then kill her . . ."

"Is that in your line, Max?" Gibbs asked.

He closed the door in their faces.

* * *

Back in the hotel room, with the sounds of Ducky's snores still coming through the wall, the two of them went over more files, and Gibbs started to wish he had brought Blackadder along, to hell with protocol, just because then he could pass off his share of the paperwork. Dinozzo wasn't talking to him, as if Gibbs had somehow screwed up the exchange with Proctor back at the house, and silence suited Gibbs just fine, so he combed over the endless array of reports and crime scene notes without a word. Dinozzo kept stifling yawns in the palm of his hand, and when Gibbs turned to see him, he was looking away. Always out the damned window, like a kid watching everyone else out on the playground.

Finally, Dinozzo threw a file across the room and it hit the wall, did a spin, and landed open and broken-winged on the carpet.

"It usually works," Dinozzo said. "What we did there usually works. I've done it before, you've obviously done it before, and it usually works if they're guilty. He wasn't."

"No," Gibbs said mildly, licking his thumb and turning a page. "He wasn't."

"So we've eliminated a suspect, except that's not good, because we don't exactly have a _plethora_ of suspects to choose from. We don't have any, actually. And we aren't going to find them by going through all of this again, because we did that last night, and the best we could get was a fucking peeping tom who threw us off his property." He looked at Gibbs. Maybe it was the light coming through the window making a halo around his face, but he looked younger. Angry and determined and young. Dinozzo pursed his lips and exhaled, cleaning himself out in what Gibbs thought was probably some yoga relaxation technique one of his ex-wives might have recognized. "I can't go all vigilante on this with you, Gibbs, because at the end of the day, I care a little more about the Lacher girl than I do about making myself look good."

"Call your partner," Gibbs said.

Dinozzo sighed and pressed a hand to his face, cutting his profile into two jagged pieces. "I know you have this idea that maybe we can do it all by ourselves, and that's good, and it's good that you kind of like me, or at least think that I know what I'm doing, but . . ."

He threw the cell at Dinozzo's head to shut him up. "I said to call him. Call whoever you think will help."

Dinozzo took the phone in two fingers, like it would bite, and blinked at him, going from hardboiled investigator to skittish rookie in three seconds flat. "Do you want anybody? I mean, one of your people?"

Gibbs had an idea that Dinozzo thought Gibbs had more resources than he actually did. That maybe Dinozzo visualized all of NCIS running smoothly under Gibbs's thumb, as if he were director instead of one of several supervisors. He couldn't decide if that amused him or irritated him. He scratched at his ear to hide a smile and said that Dinozzo could draw from his own pool this time, but to give them the rules.

"I know. You're in charge. All must bow down in worship."

He liked the sound of that. "Or get the hell out of my way."

Listening to Dinozzo calling his partner gave Gibbs the niggling suspicion that the kid had too many different personalities knocking around inside of his head. He would have to tell Abby about Dinozzo, because Abby liked crazy people, and might find these mood swings interesting. Dinozzo turned away from him when he talked, as if Gibbs couldn't hear him through the barrier of a few inches of blood and bone. He watched Dinozzo's back as he walked to the window and toyed with the blinds.

"Hey, Lucas, it's Tony. You want to help us out on the Lacher case?" He half-turned to scrape his fingers against the glass, and pulled the phone back from his ear. Gibbs heard the hissing, diluted sounds of Lucas Bayer's explosion, and then Dinozzo started talking again, continuing his little julienne conversation of which Gibbs could only hear parts. "Yeah, yeah, I _know_. No, he's not. Yes. Well, that's not really important, is it?" Dinozzo flicked the blinds and a zigzag ray of sunlight chopped the room in half. "You're the first person I called. Are you coming or not? Good. See you in a few minutes."

Dinozzo tossed him the phone. "He's coming."

"Yeah, I got that," he said, and wasn't even being sarcastic. Not really. "He needed a lot of convincing for someone who really wanted the case."

"He's human. He's not happy."

"Yeah, well, a dead kindergartner should be more important than whether or not he plays well with others." _That _had been why he had let Dinozzo in. The detective had been willing to put aside the traditional pissing contests in order to do the job; his partner was more interested in grandstanding. "And if he wanted the case so much in the first place, he should have talked to me himself."

"He's senior," Dinozzo said, as if that explained everything, as if once someone had been around long enough, they didn't have to give a damn about their job or anything else.

It was such a juvenile concept. Gibbs respected and understood competition, knew the drive that pushed agents to do their best, and hazing was understandably part of the process. But allowing a wet-behind-the-ears detective, no matter how good his instincts were, to take on all the pain that came with the job - - that was sloppy work. Dinozzo seemed competent enough, and Detective Bayer, from what Gibbs could see, took advantage of his competence and good-nature.

Not that it mattered, because protecting Dinozzo wasn't Gibbs's responsibility and it never would be, but it bothered his sense of justice.

"Anyway," Dinozzo said, dropping back onto the bed, "he'll be here soon."

"How long have you been working with him?"

"Almost two years."

It had the sound of a carefully-guarded answer, and Gibbs propped himself up on his elbow to look across to the other bed. Dinozzo was staring off into nothing with a practiced look.

"Where were you before Baltimore?"

"Philadelphia," Dinozzo said. He looked as if wanted to throw another file at the wall. "Peoria. Pittsburgh. Other cities that start with the letter P. I ran out and decided to try B instead. And if you're going to make a joke about two-year warranties or expiration dates, I swear to God I have already heard it."

"No, Dinozzo, any joke I'd make about you would be funnier than that."

"Quit NCIS and do standup," Dinozzo said. Briefly, it seemed as if he would add something else, but then he yawned so loudly that his own eyes widened in surprise. He looked sheepishly over at Gibbs. "Hey, once we get Lucas over here, do you think I can take a nap? I'm getting to the point where I'd sell my soul for forty winks." He cast an envious glance at the wall. "Dr. Mallard gets to sleep. I know I can't do a good TOD estimation, but that doesn't mean I can function indefinitely without getting any shuteye. Just give me, like, ten minutes?"

Gibbs was tempted to say no just to see what Dinozzo would do, but the urge passed. He could spare the detective ten minutes of sleep, especially if he wanted Dinozzo to run interference for the rest of the night. Besides, if Ducky found out that he had kept the kid running all night on Mountain Dew and suspiciously good hotel coffee, Gibbs would have to deal with the never-ending lecture from hell. And if Lucas Bayer showed up looking clean-shaven and well-rested, Gibbs didn't want to have to look across the room and see Dinozzo with his dark circles, sucking it up.

"You can have twenty," Gibbs said, "if you can sleep with the lights on." He waited for an answer, or at least the sound of Dinozzo pulling the covers over his head and collapsing, but there was only silence.

Dinozzo was already asleep.

Well, at least he didn't have to turn out the lights.


	3. Chapter III

Obviously, this long of a delay requires some kind of an excuse, but I'm afraid I don't have one that's very good. I'm not proud of this - - I really enjoy writing this story, but combined writer's block and outside stress kept me from it for a long time. Fortunately, I think I've hit a decent groove on it, and, while I can't promise daily updates, I think I can guarantee weekly ones until the story is finished.

- - - - -

**Chapter III**

Tony woke up staring at the clock, which told him that it was two-forty in the afternoon and that Gibbs had let him sleep for ten minutes more than he should have.

He shifted and almost fell from the bed as he straightened. The knocking at the door had to be Lucas, and Gibbs was waking him up because Tony was back to being the go-between. Still, the precious few minutes of sleep had put him in a good humor, even if they hadn't taken away his exhaustion, so he was willing enough to go up to bat for Gibbs. After all, Gibbs had done him a favor when he hadn't needed to, and Tony wasn't the type to want to be in anyone's debt.

Besides, watching Lucas go at it with Gibbs would be like the clash of the titans, and Tony didn't want to be collateral damage.

He rearranged his shirt, smoothing down wrinkles, and went to the door, hoping that Lucas would be a rumpled himself, and knowing that he wouldn't be. Lucas was like a GQ model, clothing flawless down to the Italian leather shoes that Tony wanted but couldn't afford; he thought that clothes made the man and dressed to impress. Tony might have been the same, under normal circumstances, but he had the good sense and the intuition to understand that Gibbs couldn't be so easily swayed. If anything, Gibbs kinda-sorta respected him because Tony was wrinkled and mussed-up from a twenty-four hour day and hadn't yet bolted for his apartment, eager to abandon the case for a hot shower and some clean clothes.

Lucas, he knew, wouldn't understand that. Lucas could maybe never understand that, and that was why Tony was the one sleeping in Gibbs's spare hotel bed between leads - - he could _get it_, and Lucas couldn't.

This in mind, he opened the door, and there was Lucas, as expected, spotless and clean-shaven and only superficially outraged. It was a bad omen on an already blighted day, and Tony let him inside with a scowl that was eased before he turned to face Gibbs. Everyone else was going to be frowning, Tony would have to smile just to buck the trend. But _God_, two alpha males in the same room was headache enough, and if things went badly, he'd be the one wiping the blood off the floor.

He wished that Lucas understood the concept of following someone else's lead.

_You have to _smile_, Anthony._

"Special Agent Gibbs," he said primly, "this is Detective Bayer. Detective Bayer, this is Special Agent Gibbs. The cucumber sandwiches will be on the veranda. Would you like sugar with your tea?" They both had their own way of ignoring him: Lucas brushed off his witticism with practiced ease and Gibbs gave him a single disparaging glance. "Also, you both have no sense of humor, so hey, you have _that _in common. Good to know."

Lucas said to Gibbs, "You wanted me here?"

Gibbs jerked his head. "Dinozzo did. And unless you do something in the next ten minutes to prove to me that he did it because we need you and not just because you're his friend, you're out the door."

Tony expected the tag, _And so are you, Dinozzo_, but it didn't come, and he didn't know if it was an oversight or intentional.

Maybe he was giving Gibbs too little credit in the niceness category. Tony had crashed into him and Gibbs had given him cooperation, breakfast, and a nap when Tony had really had nothing to offer the investigation besides a lot of useless cold cases. He had been sidetracked, too busy listening to what Gibbs was _saying _to pay attention to what Gibbs was _doing_. And that, Tony decided as he pushed a cup of suspiciously good coffee into Lucas's hands, was a stupid mistake, and not one he was going to make again. There were too many other things to screw up for him to keep getting the same thing wrong.

"He called me because I'm his partner," Lucas said.

"Not good enough," Gibbs said. "There had better be something more than loyalty going on. Dinozzo?"

He uncapped his cup of coffee and inhaled deeply. "Lucas has been here for a long time," he said, adding a packet of sugar. "And he has a good memory for details. We can go through these case files blind and hope that if we jab our fingers in enough places, we'll hit something that ties in with Lacher, or we can turn Lucas on them and have him . . . dowse." He stuck up his hands and imitated a dowsing rod, bending his fingers over an imaginary stretch of wood, and his pointed fingers drifted toward Lucas before he yanked them back to his sides. "Anyway. Yeah. The files are all over the beds, in a kind of postmodern alphabetical order. I may have slept on top of a couple murders from eighty-eight."

"I need to talk to Agent Gibbs," Lucas said, in a tone that strongly implied he wanted to hold the conversation without Tony in the room. It reminded Tony of his parents. Granted, Lucas was holding a coffee cup instead of a highball glass, but the resemblance was still there, eerily enough. "Tony, why don't you go home and take a shower?"

"I work better when I smell."

Lucas shook his head, washing his hands of Tony, and turned to Gibbs. "Agent Gibbs, I know that Tony made a deal with you about who is in charge of the investigation."

"Yeah, he did," Gibbs said. Compared to Lucas, his voice had a fill-in-the-blank line next to it. Tony wasn't sure if he were irritated, amused, or hungry. People who had to work with Gibbs on a daily basis probably ended up drooling in little padded rooms, because even if Gibbs wasn't actually a bastard, he was still the most confusing person Tony had ever met.

"We need to make a new deal."

"The deal Dinozzo made with me," Gibbs said, "wasn't so much a deal."

Lucas smiled. "So you agree."

"No, I mean, it wasn't so much a deal as it was him recognizing that he didn't have a leg to stand on jurisdiction-wise and then offering to help." Gibbs gave Lucas an expressionless look that reminded Tony, weirdly, of an iguana. "And what you did wasn't so much you making a deal as it was you sending your junior partner over to deal with me and then complaining when he was in on the investigation and you weren't. _That _was the deal _you_ made, Detective Bayer. Understood?"

Tony grabbed one of the squashed murder files and extended it. "Come on, Lucas," he said quietly. "It doesn't matter whose lead we follow, right? As long as we find out who killed her."

It wasn't quite a stare-down but it was as close as Tony had come in his last two years of working in Baltimore. He met Lucas's eyes and kept holding out the file like an extremely wilted olive branch, waiting for Lucas to either take it or keep talking. The second Lucas opened his mouth, Tony knew that he'd be out, and Tony would at least be a little discredited for having faith in a guy who was so obviously a pompous asshole . . . but Lucas's personality didn't matter. Because Lucas was wrong this time: Tony hadn't called him because he was his partner, he had called him because he'd known that Lucas might actually be able to do something, and that mattered - - right now, that Lucas might be able to help mattered more than whether or not he was Tony's friend, or even Tony's partner.

Right now, Lucas helping mattered more than Lucas's pride.

_And you had damn well better realize that._

Lucas took the file and the only chair, which was probably a petty way of subverting Gibbs's authority, but Tony could have danced with joy anyway. He grinned at the back of Lucas's head, snatched up another file, and fell backwards onto the bed, wriggling until he could throw his head back far enough to view Gibbs upside-down.

"See?" he said.

Gibbs whacked him with an indecent exposure from ninety-six.

It wasn't the force that surprised him, because it was barely a tap, but it was the _idea_ of the paper being used on him as if he were a disobedient mutt that made him cringe. He lost his cheerfulness immediately. There wasn't a comeback he had for that kind of treatment, and he was supposed to be the Kevlar keeping Lucas and Gibbs from killing each other, so he couldn't afford to be as outraged as he wanted to be. He'd have to just - - grin and bear it. Or bear it, at least. He'd be damned if he'd smile for the bastard's amusement, too.

He gathered up his share of the files and, balancing the stack of manila folders and leaflets, tucked the pile under his chin and headed for the door.

"Jumping ship?"

He didn't bother to turn and address his words to Lucas. "Going to Dr. Mallard's room. He'll be awake and maybe he'll let me take something out of the mini-bar."

- - - - -

Gibbs knew that Dinozzo hadn't liked the face-off with Bayer - - why else would the kid have gone running to Ducky? - - but he hoped Dinozzo realized that Gibbs had held back for his sake and his sake alone. It could have gone a lot worse. Hell, with Bayer showing up in a pressed and perfectly-matched suit while he and Dinozzo were both starting to get a little ripe, with Bayer's palpable condescension to his partner - - he had been lucky Gibbs hadn't shot him on sight and decided that three was a crowd, after all. Dinozzo probably didn't realize that. Bayer definitely didn't. He had taken Dinozzo's departure to mean that his own status was escalating and didn't see that Dinozzo's presence had protected him.

The police reports were uninspiring. There was nothing that leapt out at him, and nothing that, apparently, leapt out at Bayer. They worked in silence. Gibbs could hear Ducky and Dinozzo talking, their words muffled and indistinct.

"Do you have anything other than black threads and some old reports?"

He didn't look up from his own file. Six years ago, there had been an unsolved rape case - - a fifteen-year-old girl. "There are copies of everything on the bed."

Bayer's smile wasn't like his partner's - - it was icy and sarcastic. He stood and gathered up the leaflets, barely glancing at them. "Tony's sketches." He sounded just a little surprised at that, and brushed his thumb over one of the representations. "You're using sketches instead of photos to see the scene?"

"Photos are around here somewhere," he said. "The sketches work well enough."

He was still conscious of Bayer staring at the drawings, rubbing a thumb over one of the lines. There was something more than arrogance on his face now - - a kind of strange reverence. For that, Gibbs could look at him, but the second he raised his eyes to meet Bayer's, the expression fled, leaving behind only stone.

"He's good," Bayer said, dropping the sketches back down on the bed. "I forgot about that."

"You just use the photos most of the time?"

"We haven't worked a case together in almost a month now," Bayer said. "When they let him get back to his job, he usually comes in midway through and has to work off someone else's notes. It's been a while since he got to start at the beginning, do his own sketches." He shook his head. "They suit him. The two of you must have something in common - - he hasn't embraced the twenty-first century yet, either. Can't even type."

Before Bayer had remembered where he was, before he had thought to add that pointless little jab at Dinozzo's skills, there had been something important. Gibbs filed it away for further consideration: if Dinozzo hadn't been getting regular cases for a while, there might be disciplinary problems or worse. He'd have to look into it - - but he wasn't going to seek out information from Bayer.

They didn't get a chance to go any further before Dinozzo came back in, holding a candy bar in one hand and a cell phone in the other, looking like he was about to start the world's most half-assed juggling act.

"Hey," he said, "they've got another body." He looked at Gibbs. "Still your turf. Daughter of a petty officer. I told them to keep the scene untouched until we got there."

Son of a bitch. He hadn't expected another death. They should have been more cautious, should have put out a warning. Any bastard sick enough to rape and kill someone as young as Ellie Lacher could be sick enough to do it again. Already grabbing his things off the bed, he asked, "Why did you get the call instead of me?"

"It's hard to say," Dinozzo said flatly, "but I'm guessing they didn't want you to know?"

It would have been hard to miss Bayer's brief flicker of triumph. "Your department isn't the most cooperative one I've ever dealt with, Dinozzo."

"So sue them for not being impressed by the sandbox kids of the federal government. Half the guys at the station wouldn't know NCIS from a hole in the ground." Dinozzo put the candy bar down on top of the television and began rummaging through his pockets. "Not everyone has my breadth of knowledge, you know." With a grin, he produced a slip of paper and tossed it to Gibbs. "The address."

Bayer lifted his coat off the chair. "Tony does know more than most cops," he said, in a voice so syrupy that the compliment couldn't have been genuine. Gibbs waited for the sting. "He's well-traveled."

_Philadelphia. Peoria. Pittsburgh._ Bayer had been hoping to rattle him, but Dinozzo had already beaten him to the punch. Gibbs suddenly understood Dinozzo's weary frustration over his short-lived employers - - if his own partner wouldn't let it go, it must have been hell. Bayer could sit this round out. Maybe he was good for something, maybe he wasn't, but Gibbs didn't want to worry about trying to keep him in check at a scene.

"Not so fast, Detective," he said to Bayer. "Dinozzo called you in to look at the files and see if you could remember anyone that fit the profile. I okayed that. But you don't tag-along at the scene unless I give the word, and I haven't."

"So give it," Bayer said, still holding his coat. His face said that he thought it was just another power play, one that was pointless because he already had his foot in the door. He thought that Gibbs was making a gesture.

Gibbs looked to Dinozzo, who knew better. Dinozzo wasn't smiling. Good. The kid has some intuition, then. He knew that Marines didn't make gestures.

"He means that you stay, Lucas," Dinozzo said, stuffing the candy bar, wadded up in its wrapper, back into his pocket. "Look through the files, see if you can find us a suspect. I'll feed you the info, don't worry about it."

Bayer's smirk turned cold, and knife-blade sharp. "Tony, you don't take the lead."

"I don't have the lead," Dinozzo said quietly. "But neither do you."

"Everyone in the station will say you're bucking for a promotion. A new badge, a raise, and a new rank. Special Agent Dinozzo. That must really turn you on, Tony. Are you really trading me in for _him_?" Bayer jerked his head to the side at Gibbs. "Did your warranty run out already? I really thought you'd last longer. You're a good cop, you're a good partner, why do you want to cut and run now?"

Dinozzo bore it out, impassive. Finally, he said, "The new girl's only four, Lucas. He bashed her head in after he was done with her. So I don't actually give a damn what you think about my motivations."

Dinozzo must have known that half of intimidation was the beauty of a well-timed exit, because he turned neatly and left. Gibbs caught the door before it closed and followed, leaving Bayer behind in the silence.

- - - - -

He had expected Gibbs to say something about the confrontation with Lucas, but he supposed that he should have known better. All Gibbs demanded from him once they were in the car were the facts of the case, and Tony gave them: four years old, Alexandria Kelly, daughter of petty officer Martin Kelly, raped, and killed by a skull fracture. Found to the side of a nature trail just outside of the city by a few hikers, like something straight out of a horror movie. Tony had to clamp his mouth shut to stop himself from listing examples - - stupidity was as good as a smile, most days, but Gibbs only barely tolerated the smiling and would probably kill him if he took the chance to be a little on the dim side.

Instead, he turned to look outside and watched the street signs flash by. He had learned these in his first week in the city, wanting to have some way of grounding himself, but now he wished that he could forget the geography stamped on his mind. He didn't want to know that they were getting closer to the spot where Alexandria's body lay sprawled across the wide ribbon of dirt path. The back of her head would look pulpy, like squashed fruit.

"Something went wrong," he said, thinking about the way the skull would have broken inwards. "He found her attractive. He wouldn't have wanted to ruin her face, he didn't do that with Ellie Lacher, he choked her. Why would he start making it messy?"

Gibbs cast him a surprised glance. "Couldn't have been noise," he said. "Strangling is an easier way to shut someone up, or breaking their neck."

"It's a hell of a change in M.O.," Tony said, "but maybe that's the point. He doesn't want to give anything away. Maybe he didn't want the body tied to the Lacher case. It almost wasn't. The uniform at the scene knew her father."

"He called you."

"Did you expect him to call you?"

Gibbs didn't blink. "He could have called Bayer, but he called you."

"I'm the liaison," Tony tiredly. "It's a dirty job. They wouldn't call Lucas and ask him to work politics, they call me for that. To talk to you. To talk to anybody. The Captain says that I give good bullshit. All they want me to do is talk."

Endless hours of meetings and conferences, business lunches like he was some suited-up executive like his father instead of a cop, for God's sake. All that time wasted being polite and superficial and stupid in the name of fake charm when he couldn't summon up any of the real thing. Compared to that, Gibbs was a relief. There would be no business lunches with Gibbs, he knew that. Candy bars eaten on the run and weird hotel coffee, sure. Twenty minute naps on a bed of manila folders, absolutely. To anyone else, it would look like hell, but it was better than all of that fake, wishy-washy networking. If anyone before had ever told him that instead of playing nice, all he had to do in the name of cooperation was _help_, he would have kissed their feet in gratitude.

Didn't they understand that he was a _cop_?

He blinked and they were at the scene. He must have dozed off and been shaken awake by Gibbs's last sharp turn that threw the hiking ground into view. He didn't have to see the blood to find Alexandria's body- - there was no mistaking the yellow of the tape or the buzzing swarm of press. How had they smelled the blood this early?

He should never have told Gibbs that they used him to play nice. Resigned to his fate, he unbuckled the seatbelt and swung around to face Gibbs. "Do you want me to give them a statement while you check it out?"

Gibbs undid his own belt and yanked the keys out of the ignition. "Thought you didn't like it."

"I hate it, but I'm still better at it than you are."

He was startled to find that Gibbs's answering grin was hard and bright, like the sun. "You think that's something to be proud of?" Without waiting for a response, he pushed the car door open with his foot. "I didn't drag you here so you could waste time with the press. On your feet, Dinozzo. You've got a scene to sketch and if you fall asleep again, you will _not_ wake up happy, is that clear?"

"Absolutely," Tony said.

After that, he would have agreed to anything.


	4. Chapter IV

**Chapter IV**

Dinozzo followed close on his heels now, like an overgrown puppy. It would have been frustrating if the kid hadn't practically been stumbling over his own feet in his eagerness to work the scene. Gibbs had a hastily-rendered layout sketch shoved into his hands in ten minutes. It was all lines, minimalist work, but it was solidly done. He was sure that Dinozzo's later sketches would be more detailed, made complex by the addition of shades and textures, but for now, the surety and reassuring black-and-white was better than looking at Alexandria's caved-in skull.

"Ducky?"

Dinozzo paused, the camera hoisted to his eye. "He said he needed the equipment. He'll be here soon. Told me not to let anyone touch the body and then - - some story about Morocco that I didn't really understand. It might have involved poodles."

"You'll get used to it," he said, and turned to walk the perimeter again, if only to avoid looking at Dinozzo again. He wouldn't get used to it. He wouldn't have time. It had taken Stan a full year to sit through one of Ducky's tangents without twitching.

They had cordoned off the area badly. There should have been more space. Instead, the area within the tape was claustrophobic, and the media outside were using up all the air. Microphones had been shoved in Dinozzo's face as soon as they had stepped from the car, all of them knowing him by sight and shouting his name. The kid had ducked through the flashes and the jumble of cameras and wires to make it out. They had known him well, better than the media should know any ordinary detective.

Christ. They had kept the kid entertaining _that _circus? No wonder Dinozzo had been willing to follow his lead just to have a chance at some real work.

"Both of the victims have fathers in the Navy," Dinozzo said. It sounded like he was talking to himself. "Planned or coincidence?"

"Don't believe in them," Gibbs said, not turning around.

He didn't have to see Dinozzo's smile to hear it - - besides, he was always smiling. Too close to being the damned _Mona Lisa_ for it to be reassuring. "Plans? Or coincidences?" He stepped a few feet ahead, putting a hand above his eyes to look out over the horizon. "It's a nice day, Gibbs. Sunny. Cool. Coming into fall."

"You have a point, Dinozzo, or are you bucking for a spot on the weather channel?"

"I mean it's a good day for hiking," Dinozzo said, unfazed. "This is a popular trail this time of year. He _wanted_ the body to be found. Ellie, too. You don't dump someone in the middle of a meadow if you've got a thing for stealth. He wants us to find these girls - - it's a message."

"Yeah? Any idea what it is?"

Dinozzo turned his head, looked back at Alexandria, broken on the ground. "I don't know. 'Sick bastard was here'? You need a profiler to tell you what he's saying, I just know that he's talking. Conspicuous placement, different methods, Navy fathers . . . Doesn't take a psychology degree to recognize hinky."

Gibbs nodded, accepting that. "The change in method bothers me."

Dinozzo walked back to the body and knelt, snapping another picture. "Dr. Mallard can tell us what he used," he said. "If it's something distinctive, Lucas can track it down."

He hadn't expected Dinozzo to mention Bayer again, not after what had happened back in the hotel. He chose his words carefully, noticing the tension in the kid's hunched shoulders, the tendons standing stark and rigid in his hands. Pressure was one thing. Shaping someone so roughly and carelessly that they broke in the making . . . that was another. If Dinozzo had snapped at his partner, Gibbs would have been less worried, but he hadn't. He _carried_ the anger with him, bound up, tight and constricting. It might even be dangerous to disregard the force that anger might have.

"Will he be there when you get back?" Cautiously, deferring to Dinozzo's judgment on at least this one issue. Dinozzo knew his partner and just maybe - - from the way Bayer had handled the sketches - - his partner knew him.

Dinozzo looked at him, eyes glass, giving nothing away. "He's a cop, Gibbs."

_Not a good one_, Gibbs thought, but didn't say. He moved from Dinozzo and the body, trusting the detective to capture all of the images before Ducky arrived.

His own crime scene sketches had always been sparse and functional, transposing only necessities. It had never been one of his talents. Given the choice, he had assigned the duty to Blackadder or Burley. Stan Burley had been able to draw from memory, each detail unwinding from the tip of his pencil as he sat at his desk, eyes narrowed in concentration. Watching Dinozzo alternate between the pad and the camera, he wondered if it meant anything that Dinozzo completed them at the scene and that his were almost unbearably lush, with each drop of blood clinging to the grass lingering in graphite on the paper. His eyes never moved from the body, as if he could only look at it once without losing his mind and had to get everything in one shot so he never had to return to the mangled flesh, to the broken bone, to the cloyingly copper scent of blood.

He bent down to study the ground. Alexandria had been left to the side of the trail, and Gibbs had had some hope for lifting footprints off the dirt road itself, but it was mockingly scattered with hiking impressions of all sorts - - round knee prints from where someone had fallen, deep heel-toe marks, and dozens of other shapes running across the path.

What the hell. He'd print them anyway.

He thought of the time it would take for all of the evidence to be sent to Abby. By the time it went through all the forests of paperwork, there could be another little girl dead.

They didn't have that kind of time, days marked with bodies instead of sunrises.

He shouted for Dinozzo, who came slowly, reluctantly, the rendered corpse of the child clutched between his fingers and outstretched, like a grotesque bouquet.

"I wasn't really finished," he said. "But I guess it's good enough."

The paper looked wilted, dying. Gibbs stared at Dinozzo instead. "Then _finish _it, Dinozzo, until you _know_ it's good enough."

Dinozzo's hand crept back to his side. "I thought you wanted - -"

"What I want is my forensics specialist up here, now. Can your people share a lab?"

Dinozzo sighed. "You can't just use my people? Believe it or not, Baltimore has an actual forensics lab, we don't just work out of some backyard shack with a chemistry set. I know you trust your team and that's terrific, but could you at least _acknowledge_ that there might be someone here that's not tripping over their own shoelaces?"

"Yours are double-knotted, aren't they, Dinozzo?"

He'd said it lightly, not wanting it to mean too much, but to see the way Dinozzo's face changed at the realization, he had given away everything.

There was a sudden openness there, the same vulnerability that he had seen in Dinozzo when he'd been with Bayer, and Gibbs pressed forward. He had fumbled, shown his hand too soon and too plainly. He might as well take advantage of it.

- - - - -

_It's really amazing how much I'm going to lose my job for this_, Tony thought, and put his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone so that he didn't end up spilling that little revelation to half the forensics lab.

"_One_ scientist," he said. "One. You'll have her way outnumbered, and anyway, she's NCIS, not FBI. You don't hate NCIS, Pete, you pretty much have no feelings about them at all. You've never met anyone from NCIS. No, Pete, that was someone from the ATF. Yes, I'm sure. Come on. One little scientist. Your kingdom is not going to be overtaken by one NCIS scientist running test on a case you're not even working on."

He held the phone away from his ear.

"You're not working on it because we don't have it, Pete. It's not our case. They have it. I'm just kind of playing Jimmy Olsen."

Pete finally said, "You're sure he's only bringing in one?"

"I swear on my life."

"Come on, Tony, your life doesn't mean anything to me."

"If he calls in more than one small, itsy-bitsy, extremely compact and travel-sized scientist, I'll pick up the tab for all your takeout for a month. How's that for motivation?"

He had to smile at Pete's practically orgasmic sigh, no doubt wondering how many pizzas and containers of sweet and sour pork he could fit into Tony's budget.

"Fine. You know I wouldn't do this for anyone else."

"I know," Tony said earnestly. "You're a saint, Pete. I'm serious."

"I wouldn't do it for Lucas."

"And I know that he lies awake at night wishing he had the chance to buy you food," Tony said, but it fell a little flat. He thought of Lucas asking him if he really wanted to cut and run. "So I can tell him that his girl has an in, right? And you'll be nice?" There was a sullen silence that Tony optimistically interpreted as acquiescence. "Great. You're a god among men."

"Don't I _know_ it," Pete muttered, and hung up on him.

Tony closed his phone and turned to Gibbs. "If you actually _do _ship more than one scientist here, _you're _going to be the one footing the bill. I swear to God I cannot afford to be the lab's meal ticket for a week. My checks will bounce through the roof by the end of the first two days. Do you have any idea how funny scientists think it is to have Red Bull chugging contests? I can't cover that."

"Relax, Dinozzo," Gibbs said. "One scientist."

Tony rubbed his temples. "Thank God." He leaned his head into his palm and saw Ellie and Alexandria as his eyes closed. He opened them immediately and then slowly, with great hesitation, closed them again. There might still be something there. There might have been something that he had missed, that even the clearest of the sketches had ignored. He kept staring at the bodies as he talked, not letting his eyes move from the blood, from the dead children. "Don't think I don't know what happened. You played me. I let you, but you still played me. I just wanted you to know that I knew."

"So why did you let me?"

"I told you," Tony said, "I'll follow your lead. But you could have just asked. You didn't have to . . . say that."

He was lying through his teeth, and he had the feeling that Gibbs knew it. The realization that he'd been played had actually hit him out of nowhere while he'd been dialing Pete - - a complete sucker punch. He'd actually let himself cave under a single compliment, the law enforcement equivalent of a cheap date. He hadn't even held out for something genuine, even a better lie than some throwaway remark about _shoelaces_.

Lying now was the only one he could save face.

What was even worse than being played was the fact that he'd wanted to believe it.

"Don't go to the trouble next time," he said bitterly, and meant it. "Just give me a damn order. I know where I stand." He looked down at his sketchbook, flipped through the pages, and tore one free from the binding. "Here. This is the best one."

Gibbs took it without comment.

"You talked to Lacher. I want to talk to Kelly."

"What if he won't talk to you?"

"Everyone talks to me," Tony said levelly. "Lucas. Pete. Dr. Mallard. Even you. So do I have _permission_ to go now, _boss_?"

"See what you can find out," Gibbs said.

He told himself that he hadn't wanted Gibbs to look guilty, anyway. He had forgotten what he'd most needed to remember - - that his alliance with NCIS was only temporary, that Gibbs would be a wisp of smoke before his next evaluation. He had made the mistake of getting too comfortable. He wouldn't do it again.

He thought that he heard Gibbs call to him when he was struggling through the crowd, but he didn't look back. He kept moving, the way he always did.

- - - - -

Ducky looked worn. His field examination of the body had been clipped and concise, with no divergences in the flow of thought, and that, if nothing else, had told Gibbs that the case was taking its toll on him. Hell, he could sympathize. He only had to find the bodies. Ducky was the one who had to cut them open, had to be shut in with them for hours in autopsy, and his refusal to let them be just empty flesh multiplied the problem. Ducky didn't see a shell. He saw a little girl, still there, still present. And then he had to reach in and cut out her heart.

Gibbs could never have done it. There was a reason Ducky was one of the best men he knew.

"Where has your young friend gotten himself off to? I must admit, it was more pleasant seeing him in the morning than the . . . personage I found in your room when I left."

"Bayer stayed?"

Ducky lifted his hands. "Who can say, Jethro? I left him there."

"Yeah," Gibbs said, and couldn't stop the slight hint of a smile from showing, "so did Dinozzo. Tore him a new one, actually."

"Admirable. Where is he now?"

He had tried to make Dinozzo stop. At the last second, he had known that he shouldn't leave things like that - - he needed to do right by Dinozzo, if only because he might need him later on. He had meant to call him back, to tell him that the compliment had been genuine enough and that he hadn't started pulling strings until later, but - - Dinozzo hadn't stopped. He had heard, Gibbs was sure of that. He had looked down when Gibbs had said his name, but he hadn't stopped. He'd kept walking, leaving Gibbs wondering exactly who had been played.

And who had won.

"He's interviewing Kelly. Maybe he'll have some luck."

"Better than you, I would think," Ducky said.

There were only a handful of people that ever would have said that to him. Gibbs couldn't help but regret, sometimes, that Ducky was one of them.

It was the truth, that was the problem: Dinozzo _was_ better. Not better than him, necessarily, but better than he had expected. When Dinozzo had lit up at the praise like one single acknowledgment of competence was his own personal Christmas, he had been stupid enough to believe that Dinozzo's _wanting_ was at the center of him. He had forgotten that layers in people were more complicated than that - - there was no core, no fundamental truth, everything was jumbled inside. Some things were bigger than others, and he had the idea that maybe that smile had said more about Dinozzo than Dinozzo had meant for it to, but Dinozzo was a cop for all of that. He should have remembered, should have known that Dinozzo, too, knew how to play the game.

What he wanted to admit to Ducky was his own shaky feeling that he had lost something important in that exchange.

Under other circumstances, he might have come clean, but they didn't have time for that kind of second-guessing and Ducky didn't need the burden of his thoughts right now.

Ducky took off his hat and ran a hand through his hair. If Gibbs had been a lesser man, he wouldn't have noticed that those fingers trembled slightly.

"I should go take care of her," he said. "Alexandria, did you say? Such a lovely name. I knew a young woman called _Alexandra_, but of course she was older, and her fate much better. When you catch the bastard, Jethro, I hope that he forces your hand."

Gibbs lowered his hand and felt the reassuring weight of the gun, cradled into his palm. "It wouldn't take much forcing, Duck."

"I wouldn't think so."

Death was the end of the road - - he could go no further talking about their killer. "I had Dinozzo clear some space in his lab and I have Abby coming down today. This case is our priority now. Blackadder can handle anything else that comes up at home, even if she needs to get a forensics temp in there."

"Vivian, dear as she is, would never have gotten your approval to work alone. Are you sure she's ready for this responsibility?"

"No, I'm not, and it's piss-poor luck that Stan took off when he did. I could have trusted him to hold things down. Blackadder I'm not so sure about."

"Your numbers have dwindled, I'm afraid. If you don't want to find yourself attached to someone else's top choice, you might try a few interviews of your own after this business is attended to. It would be better to have some say in your own people."

Gibbs grimaced. "I hate interviews."

"Yes, I know," Ducky said mildly. "You tend to provoke rather unusual responses in your applicants. The unmistakable terror, for instance."

He allowed himself a smile at that: the ones that he could terrify that easily would never last, anyway, so they were never a great loss. Besides, the amusement value was all the interviews were good for, for the most part: bureaucratic bullshit. How was he supposed to sit in a room and _talk_ with someone and use _that_ to know how they would handle being under fire? How did a conversation and credentials tell him if they would take orders? Gibbs had never been able to see anything in words alone: the meticulous process of sorting through applications might have appealed to Burley, but he had always needed action to define his agents. To define anyone. An interview would only give him someone who talked a good game. He needed more than that from his people.

But Ducky was right - - better at least that he drew someone himself from the scrap heap. He didn't want to trust someone else's judgment on something this important.

"I'll take care of it when this is over," he said, and turned the focus away from that upcoming tedium and onto the case. "Any signs of those black threads on this body?"

"Nothing that I've seen yet, but I'll have more time to look when I have her in autopsy. If anything distinctive turns up, I'll reach you immediately. But the bodies looked very clean. There aren't as many defensive wounds as I would expect, either. If these girls struggled, they didn't begin until it was far too late."

"You think they knew their attacker?"

Ducky sighed. "I think they at least _trusted_ him, but children can be fooled into accepting strangers. I'll examine her stomach contents - - Ellie Lacher had only eaten a school lunch, by all appearances - - but if I find some candy with Alexandria, and if Abby can trace it, we might have an idea how he gains their cooperation."

"Maybe Dinozzo will turn up some family friends that I can cross-reference to Lacher," he said, but without much hope.

Lacher had been essentially useless upon interview - - insisting that Gibbs investigate his daughter's murder but too shocked by grief to think clearly. Being a father had overwhelmed being a soldier. It was a damned unpleasant thing to hope that Kelly might have loved his daughter less, or grieved with less intensity, but that was what he found himself wishing for. That was what needed to be true. Dinozzo could talk, sure, but he had been talking to the press. Gibbs didn't know how he would handle a man destroyed by his child's death.

"If there's a connection between Lacher and Kelly outside of the Navy, I need to know about it," he said. "If Dinozzo can't turn something up, we're back in square one."

"Worse still," Ducky said quietly, "would be to find there was a third square."

He nodded. There were only so many children he could find this way before he unraveled completely - - the son of a bitch wouldn't even _need_ to force Gibbs's hand if they found another body. He had to believe, for that alone, that there was something they were missing, something that Dinozzo could find. He wasn't used to sitting on his ass and waiting for someone else - - someone who wasn't even on his team - - to turn up with a solution. If it had just been Bayer combing through papers, it would have been fine, but Dinozzo had somehow gone from a liaison who could give him local context to someone out there, away from him, running an interview on his own.

Still, he reassured himself, Dinozzo had said it: he was working under Gibbs's command.

When he thought about it, that he believed Dinozzo was telling the truth was the most unsettling thing of all: he hadn't even _thought_ that Dinozzo might have gone off to claim some glory for himself. He had trusted without question that Dinozzo would listen, would allow himself to be reigned in.

That was more trust than he usually assigned in two days - - more than he usually assigned in two _years_.

_You'd better be worth it, Dinozzo_, he thought, and looked down at the sketch folded in his hand. He had heard of pictures that were so real that the figures came to life, but Alexandria, shown in those thin pencil lines, was so much like reality that she could only have lifted from the page to die again.


	5. Chapter V

**Chapter V**

Marcia Kelly brought Tony a cup of coffee and then asked him if he wanted anything else. When he said no, she only stared at him blankly and then retreated to the kitchen again, where he heard the minute clangs of pots knocking against each other. Tony put the coffee cup down carefully on the coaster and looked to see if Petty Officer Kelly would follow his wife.

Instead, the man sat there stiffly, looking civilian and mussed in his sweatpants and workout tee-shirt, the neck of a beer bottle clenched between his fingers.

"Go ahead, detective," Kelly said. He had been young before today; sudden lines had been added to the corners of his eyes. "I don't think I have the time for you to be considerate."

"The first dead girl was Ellie Lacher. Her father was Lieutenant Commander Lacher." He paused, to see if some reaction or recognition would show on Kelly's face, but only that strange blankness remained. "We believe there's a connection between Ellie and your daughter. Did you know the Lacher family at all?"

Kelly shook his head. "The name is familiar, that's all."

"Have you noticed anything suspicious at all about your daughter's behavior? Did she ever talk about someone you never saw?"

"I wouldn't know," Kelly said. "I was on tour for six months before this, I . . . I've only been able to see her for the last two weeks." He pressed the heel of his hand to his face, fingers wiping ineffectually against his eyes. "Two weeks isn't a lot of time to get to know your daughter again, detective."

"No, sir," Tony said. "It's not."

Agreement was the only route he could take: Kelly could not be comforted and would not respond to any syrupy attempts at conciliation. He could never have gotten closer by apologizing; it meant nothing that he was sorry for Kelly's loss. It would have to be enough that he was there. He couldn't offer solace that was better than agreement: two weeks was very little time to relearn your daughter and four years was very little time to love her.

Kelly closed his eyes. "Marcia might know," he said. "She spent more time with Alex. She always said - - that she wished that I was home more often, that she didn't want Alex growing up not knowing her father. I always thought that there was more time than that. But her preschool teacher would have seen her more than I did, known her better. I needed the damned shrink to tell me what my own daughter was thinking. I was a stranger to her - - if someone was bothering her, she would have gone to her mother."

"What about you? Do you know anyone who might come after you?"

Kelly's smile was perfect, graceless. "Not here, detective. I only made enemies overseas."

It was probably true, but still, something tugged at him. Two fathers in the military might have been a coincidence, no matter what Gibbs thought, but two fathers in the Navy - - that was more unlikely. It had to mean something, even if Kelly couldn't explain it.

He played softball for a few minutes, tossing out easy questions about daily routine and family friends, trying to stop himself from tapping his fingers against the coffee table. Finally, as he had thought she would, Marcia came back from the kitchen. Her eyes were red-rimmed and she looked thin and ragged in her quilted bathrobe. Still, he thought she wasn't far from her husband in terms of steel: she seemed to gather in courage before she sat down, but she looked at him levelly with those rubbed pink eyes.

"Mrs. Kelly," he said politely, "do you mind if I ask you a few questions about your daughter?"

She didn't answer at first, just toyed with the ratty belt on her robe, but finally said, "Whatever I can do to help. Ask whatever you need to."

"Did you daughter ever tell you about someone . . . someone older . . . behaving strangely around her? Teasing her, giving her presents? Was there anything like that?"

"No," she said. He thought he could hear the low thrum of ferocity in her voice, her anger at being underestimated. "We would have done something about that, detective. I always knew where she was. It's all marked out on the schedule on the refrigerator. She didn't have many play-dates - - I took her to preschool, to the doctor, and we came home. There weren't any strangers in her life."

As gently as he could, he said, "It may not be a stranger we're looking for, Mrs. Kelly."

"There wasn't anyone. There wasn't anyone like that."

"Mrs. Kelly - -"

"Detective Dinozzo, don't you think I would have known if someone had been . . . _molesting_ my own daughter?" The anger that had sustained her suddenly rushed out in those words and Tony could only see a woman again, a mother with no child, her fingers knotted in her bathrobe, her hair stringy, and she bit her lip against the tears. "No one - - no one was hurting Alex. She was happy. She never said a word about anything being wrong."

"Was there anyone else she would have talked to? A grandparent, anyone?"

"Rob's parents live in South Carolina," she said. "We don't see them all that much - - Alex would never go near her grandmother when she was a baby. My parents are dead. She might have told Dr. Mikell if something was wrong, but she would have told _me_ first."

"Dr. Mikell was your pediatrician?"

She scrubbed at her eyes with her sleeve. "No. He's a family counselor. My friend Mary recommended him for Alex when Rob went overseas - - I didn't want her to have problems with her father going away for so long. I took Alex to see him twice a week - - I had my sessions on Friday, right after hers. He never mentioned anything unusual, and we usually talked about Alex."

"Well, if something was wrong, it might be clearer now."

She gave him Mikell's information and he hoped it would be possible to foist this interview off on Gibbs. Shrinks, family counselors, psychiatrists - - whatever they were calling themselves - - always made him uneasy. He'd had a guidance counselor in high school with delusions of grandeur, who had always liked him and who had always been fumbling at his head, trying to loosen some kind of knot that would spill out all of his secrets. Tony could never trust anyone who could be so clumsy with something so important.

Still, Alex might have told Mikell something, when she was playing with dolls in his office or drawing pictures of her father at his low, brightly-colored table. And if she had said anything, anything at all, he had to find it. It was like doing an autopsy, and he could tell Dr. Mallard that - - it was like cutting through the surface and finding all the blood the body had skillfully hidden inside.

- - - - -

Bayer had bolted and left the files scattered over the two beds, as disorganized and chaotic as if an explosion had separated the pages and let them fly.

"There's no note," Dinozzo said, coming out of Ducky's room with a chocolate bar clasped in one hand. His mouth had tightened. "He should have stayed." Not meeting Gibbs's eyes, he fell backwards into the armchair, still squeezing the Hershey bar between his fingers. "The Kelly interview was one brick wall after another. Mostly just bad coffee and crying."

Gibbs knew. He had had too many of those conversations over the years. Parents rocked back in the loss of their children, getting further and further from the real world in some futile attempt to crawl into the past. If there were questions to be asked, you had to tunnel through with them, bump into all the years and milestones, and upset their grief. The Kellys and the Lachers might leave their daughters' rooms as they were, with pink walls and tissue paper butterflies, but at least then, Dinozzo would have only had one room of the dead to enter. The whole house would have been that way, now, with sticky stains from Kool-Aid spilt on the carpet and Barbie dolls like plastic refugees on the fireplace. The families could call it preservation, if they wanted, but it was a haunting.

Bad coffee and crying, he thought, would probably sum it up.

Dinozzo unpeeled the wrapper slowly. "Kelly said he didn't know Lacher."

"You think he was telling the truth?"

Dinozzo looked at him then, hard and disdainful. "I don't think he could have lied about what he had for breakfast, Gibbs, let alone about something that could help us."

Gibbs let it go. What had been said at the scene was still between them, unaddressed, and he thought that Bayer's absence was probably a gap to Dinozzo, who had been so damnably sure that his partner would stick around.

"Did you get anything better than the coffee?"

"The mom and daughter were seeing a family counselor, some guy named Mikell. It's worth a try. She might have told him something she couldn't tell her mother, but we'll probably just turn up sad pictures of her daddy and a some finger-painted Rorschach tests."

"She was in therapy at four?"

Dinozzo smiled slightly. "Mental health is the new tickle-me Elmo. You've never set foot in a shrink's office, have you?"

"Marriage counseling," Gibbs said. It wasn't something he had to give away. He was granting Dinozzo some small insight, as a cheap consolation prize for all the hell they were going through. "Twice. The third time I knew better."

"Three _times_ or - -"

He looked levelly at Dinozzo.

"- - three _wives_," Dinozzo said, his smile widening in realization. "That's pretty impressive, Gibbs. Your alimony payments must be - - absolutely not something that I need to think, know, or talk about." He was still smiling, though, and looking up instead of at the empty space where his partner should have been. "Do you want the interview? Personally, I play word association enough at the yearly psych evaluations. Dog-cat, big-small, and ten opposites later, I'm getting a prescription for Prozac."

Dinozzo's mouth seemed to keep going long after his brain had given up the chase.

"I can take Mikell," Gibbs said. He owed Dinozzo one, anyway. "Shower and get some sleep."

Dinozzo blinked at him owlishly. "We have that kind of time?"

"No, but later we'll have even less."

"You could learn to be less honest," Dinozzo said, and moved slowly to the bed, the candy held close to his face as if he wanted to only breathe it in. "Did anyone ever tell you that?"

"Not in those exact words," Gibbs said. It was true. Narrowed down and more strictly defined, though, what Dinozzo had really meant was _bastard_. "Take Ducky's room and you can shut the lights off."

"I like the background noise," Dinozzo said. He moved one hand underneath his neck and found the remote control with the other, hesitating with his fingertip poised over the power button. "I used to play _North by Northwest_ every night before I fell asleep. I never could time it well enough to drop off during the crop-duster scene." Gibbs waited for the story to have a point, or at least an ending, but Dinozzo didn't add anything else, only said, "Is this going to bother you?"

Gibbs shook his head and leaned back against the headboard. He didn't know what would happen if he closed his eyes.

Dinozzo rode through the channels, never staying more than a few seconds on each one. Gibbs counted faded movie stars, thought about the posters Ellie Lacher and Alex Kelly might have pasted on their walls if they had gotten a few more years, and turned his head away.

He didn't see what made Dinozzo stop.

"There's always something," Dinozzo said softly, and turned up the volume. "Talk about media logic. If they can't get a statement from their golden boy, they talk to his partner. Never mind that Lucas never even _saw _the Kelly scene. All they want is someone to fill up a few minutes of airtime and fan the flames."

Bayer's voice, rich and smooth with all the arrogance ironed out of it by microphones and distance, poured easily through the speakers.

"This is Baltimore homicide's highest priority," Bayer said. "We have people working on it around the clock. I understand how urgent the situation is - - I have a daughter of my own. All of the concerned parents can rest assured that we will not rest until the killer is in custody and our children are safe."

Dinozzo cut him off midway through the next sentence, another presumptuous promise that Bayer had nothing to do with answering. Gibbs watched his hand tighten around the remote before he tossed it, hard, onto the floor. He could understand well enough. Bayer had put on a pretty face for the crowd, had acted like a devoted cop and a concerned father when he hadn't even been willing to suffer through a few indignities for the sake of the case. It would have been one thing to steal the glory of this investigation - -it was quite another to act as if this _were _something glorious, something to be expanded into a perfect public relations stunt.

"They'll figure it out eventually," Dinozzo said, closing his eyes. "Then he'll catch the flak from everybody. At least I'll have company in hell."

Gibbs adjusted the pillows. "There's always Boston, Dinozzo."

"Baghdad," Dinozzo said. "Borneo. Bangladesh." He sounded wistful.

"Borneo and Bangladesh are _countries_," Gibbs said. "And you wouldn't last a week in Baghdad. You might survive Bismarck."

Dinozzo laughed. Gibbs counted cities until he was asleep.

- - - - -

Tony slept with his cell phone. Some cops he had met slept with their guns lodged between the headboard and the mattress, which sounded Tony like a good way to either blow his own brains out or ruin the wood-grain, but that was tradition. It was hardboiled. Sleeping with a cell phone was weird and not something that he ever brought up at a convention. It was just something that he did, like brushing his teeth or turning off the lights.

Since Pittsburgh, he took it off the nightstand when he went to bed, curled it in one hand, and slept with it against his chest.

It vibrated in the palm of his hand two hours after he had closed his eyes. _Lucas_. Shifting out from underneath the covers, he moved into the bathroom so that he didn't wake Gibbs.

"You make a good speech, Lucas."

"Don't, Tony. People needed to hear something. It's your job to keep them satisfied, remember? They came nipping at my heels looking for _you_, you know, the same way everyone else is. You're one mistake away from getting your ass kicked down to _patrol_. Unless you want to walk a beat, you'll drop this."

"You wanted the case," Tony said, twisting his fingers into his temples. "You wanted it, too."

"I wanted it to be _ours_," Lucas said. "I didn't want you to trade it away for some crappy hotel room, Tony. I wanted us to handle it ourselves."

"The room's pretty nice, actually. Pillows like marshmallows."

"What happened to you, Tony? You used to fight the feds tooth-and-claw if you thought you could win or even screw them over. We went out that night after we snatched that first case from the FBI, remember, drank a case of beers and you passed out on my sofa? You were really _something_, Tony. I knew I'd like you, and now - -"

"You did it first." He leaned against the sink and didn't turn around, unwilling to see his own reflection. "Say whatever you want about the way I _used _to be, Lucas, but you gotta know you're the one that did it first. You let them make me into a puppet and taught them how to pull all of my strings. _Six weeks_ I had without a single _case_. Two weeks where I only had suicides, back-to-back for _days_. Do you know how tired I got of being woken up at three in the morning because someone was standing on a bridge? And half-asleep, somehow, you're putting someone's life in my hands? You did it first, Lucas."

"You're good at it," Lucas said, small and selfish.

"I'm better at this," Tony said, because it was the truth. "It's not an interview and it's not a contest. He can find out who killed these girls and that seems like a damned good reason to listen to him."

"You gave him our case because I pissed you off by sending you to a few conferences," Lucas said. "Because you had to talk to a few reporters." He sounded as if he were shaking his head, disappointed. "I did your job today, Tony. I kept the rumors in check."

"_You _did it? Do you even _get it_? You never had a clue how to deal with the press. If all you have is nothing, you _give them _nothing. No comment. You really think they can't tell when you're clueless? This guy is smart and now he knows that _you_ know jack - - and you told him that you're the one that's supposed to know everything. You stupid son of a bitch." Tony squeezed down hard, making the phone crackle into his ear. "You as good as killed another little girl tonight, Lucas."

"It was just one interview," Lucas said. There wasn't even a note of fear in his voice. There was nothing. "You do them all the time. It was fifteen seconds on a television screen."

"Fifteen seconds that _he saw_."

"You don't know that's true."

"I hope it isn't," Tony said. He rubbed his eyes. "You shouldn't come back here. I don't think he'll let you in and I don't think I'll try too hard to convince him. I'm going to get some sleep, wash an inch of dirt off me, and go talk to Pete, okay? And pretty soon things will be back to normal. But not _now_. Not on this one. You're good, yeah, but he's better - - better than both of us. And I need that right now."

"You like him, don't you," Lucas said, not really a question. Tony thought he might have been smoking, sitting out on the porch. Marie would be with her mom and Lucas always stayed up late on those nights. "You really do."

"I don't think he's the kind of guy you like." It wasn't an answer, but he didn't care, because Lucas's question hadn't been real, either. "Did you even want something, Lucas?"

This was why he never stayed. Enough time, and nothing was casual. He had only been in Baltimore two years and already there was too much weight in this silence. Lucas had already dug into him and found some raw memory that could hurt and there were more of them, too, all implied in the unspoken questions: _Why don't you trust me? Why are you risking everything for this_? It was the guilt that he used to think only parents could use: _wasn't I the one that patched you up after the Martinez case, wasn't I the one that covered your ass when you were late, wasn't I, wasn't I_ - - and this was why he didn't stay. Couldn't stay. Because there were times when he needed Lucas to shut up and Lucas wouldn't. Because he _liked _Lucas, despite everything, and he didn't need to like Lucas right now.

"You have to stop this, Tony," Lucas said. Sincere. _Wasn't I the one who defended you, when no one else would? _"You're going to lose your job."

"Wouldn't be the first time," he said. "There's always Bismarck."

He hung up before he could tell Lucas what he had meant, before he could give anything else away. Boston. Brooklyn. Bridgeport. And he would know better this time and wouldn't end up as a mascot or a mutt that could do a neat trick.

He slipped back into the bedroom and as he eased down into the mattress, he thought he heard Gibbs ask where he had been.

"Don't worry about it," he said. "Travel arrangements. Guilt trips. Not your problem."

There was no answer but rough breathing, _sleep _breathing, and he knew that he had imagined the question.

He wondered what the weather was like in Bangladesh.


	6. Chapter VI

**Chapter VI**

Tony's first month in Baltimore had been grunt work and suspicious glances. No one wanted to trust a rookie, let alone a rookie who had been passed around all through his career. The normal jibes went through circulation: no one wanted to buddy up with Philly's sloppy seconds. Or Pittsburgh's thirds. Or Peoria's fourths. He was stuck bringing coffee and fetching test results, which was how he met Pete. Pete gave him a once-over, told him to shut up before he even said anything, and then knocked back three cans of Red Bull like it was lemonade. Tony had respect for anyone who could do that and the good sense to know that it wouldn't kill him to be on _someone's_ good side, so he started bribing the lab with stimulants and pizza.

Two years later, he was their favorite. Theresa gave him bubblegum and saltwater taffy with a kind, indulgent smile; Max told him things about hacking that he didn't understand; and Joss kept one of the revolving chairs open for him. Pete was _Tony's_ favorite though, partially because Pete had come first and partially because Tony understood the chain of command. It was a workable relationship: Tony offered food and flattery and Pete insulted him a lot but always ran Tony's tests first.

Tony _liked_ the lab. It was nice and safe and unchanging.

He should have known better.

"I _love_ NCIS," Pete said.

"You don't," Tony said. "You don't love anyone. You also don't bring anyone drinks." He nodded at the immense plastic cup in Pete's hand, something that looked obnoxiously caffeinated that probably tasted like liquid jujubes. "I've been here for two years and you wouldn't even give me a quarter last week for the soda machine."

Pete only blinked at him. "What does that have to do with anything? This is for _Abby_."

"Scuito? Where is she? She paged Gibbs, I'm supposed to find out whether - -"

Pete moved in front of him. "I have a better idea. Why don't you go over to Theresa, get some candy, and _I'll_ bring the evidence to _you_? And I'll talk to Abby. And you won't. Ever." He must have gotten some clue from the way Tony kept staring at him, because he edged closer and said, "Fine. You can _talk_ to her. But if you _flirt _with her, you lose all status. No more candy, no more spinning chairs, no more mp3s . . . and your stuff ends up on the _bottom_ of my pile. You will not screw me on this."

Hot breath drifted across Tony's face. It smelled like Crest and nachos.

"So," Tony said, "she must be pretty hot." He held up his hands when it looked like Pete might be a centimeter away from apoplexy. "Kidding. I won't flirt."

"And don't do that thing where you speak Italian."

"I won't speak Italian."

Pete patted him on the head like he was a sheepdog and handed him the drink. "Tell her it's from me. Now, left - - down the hall. Follow the music."

At first, Tony thought that "follow the music," was some kind of cryptic reference to a movie he hadn't seen or a game he'd never played, but it turned out that Pete had meant it literally. Once he moved down the hallway, he could hear the bass and stuck his head in the doorway that seemed to be shaking the most.

"Abby Scuito?"

_Not _what he had been expecting given Gibbs's obvious fondness for her; _exactly _what he had been expecting given _Pete's_ obvious fondness for her. Under the coat, it was all black leather and slanted panels of red silk, topped with a vaguely disturbing cartoon shirt. Hot. Very hot. And very, very off-limits, because even if he ditched Baltimore, he was pretty sure that Pete could ruin his life from a distance. He resolutely kept his eyes above the neckline.

"Tony Dinozzo," he said. "I'm working with Special Agent Gibbs." He held out the drink because he knew enough about scientists to get that he was second to the caffeine. "This is from Pete and not from me."

She took it and slurped. "I was thinking . . . older, and less with the nice suit."

"I could say the same thing." He waited to see how she would react and was relieved when she grinned in response - - someone with a sense of humor, someone he didn't have to _fight_ for. It was about damned time. "Gibbs said whatever you had would be worth the trip."

Abby flipped a pigtail over her shoulder. "I know why they weren't bruised."

Tony thought of fruit closed within his fingers, mushy skin caving in underneath his touch. "The girls? You know why they didn't struggle?"

"Ducky sent me the stomach contents to see if either of the girls had been drugged." She moved to the computers and pulled something up on the screen, some unrecognizable chemical compound. Tony counted elements: nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon, oxygen . . . "It's Secobarbitol," she said. "Also known as - -"

"Seconal," he said. "Reds. Dolls. I've worked a few overdoses before." He looked at the seemingly harmless link of chemicals. "That's easy enough to get on the streets. I can cross-reference the sex crime files with possession and maybe turn someone up." He had wanted something better than a readily-available sedative; something definitive that would scream a suspect's name. "Thanks, Abby."

"Don't assume that's all I have," she said, holding up a warning finger.

He obediently stopped. "I give you full marks for showmanship."

Abby smiled, obviously pleased, and pulled up something else that he didn't understand. "It put the lotion on the skin," she said, nodding at the components listed on the computer. "_This _is Buttercream. I found it on both bodies and given the price, it's definitely not kid's stuff. It's a sensuous lotion made from all-natural ingredients that produces skin that is smooth and silky to the touch." She switched computers and pulled up a large corporate logo. "Visited the website. Informative _and _stylish. I didn't know you could have flash videos about how to make hand lotion. _You_ are looking for someone who can definitely afford to indulge their vanities - - drugs and pricy lotion."

"Well, since most of the guys I can find wouldn't be able to afford a regular supply of Evian, you just made my day a hell of a lot better."

In truth, it was the near-ecstasy of narrowed focus, of knowing exactly what he had to stitch together in order to turn meaningless names into something coherent and _useful_. How many of his cross-referenced finds would have that kind of cash, that kind of profile? He could trim it down to a dozen suspects, maybe less, and if they showed the names to the families and waited for that faint and terrible gleam of recognition . . . they could _have_ this, they could. He knew it. For the first time since Lucas had gone live, Tony thought that there might be some salvation in this. There might not be another broken little girl if they moved quickly.

Abby waved her hand in front of his face. "I've seen guys look at porn like that."

He smiled. "This is just really, _really_ good. I wish I _had _bought you a drink."

"One is enough," she said sedately, and slurped at it again. "Tell him thanks for me."

- - - - -

Dr. Mikell's office had a curious mingled scent of eucalyptus and crayon wax. Gibbs could see brightly-colored flakes embedded in the snarls of the carpet near the lowest of the tables. The room was halved into split personalities: mahogany shelves backed one wall and uncomfortable leather chairs with brass studs dominated the available floor-space; the children's side had opened jars of Play-Doh resting on a table with marker scribbles on it. A stuffed giraffe had fallen to the Serengeti hidden beneath the curtains.

"Alex was exceptionally bright for her age," Mikell said. "I'd recommended to her mother that she be sent to a private school when she was older."

Gibbs raised his eyebrows. "You can tell that at four?"

"Of course. Some of her drawings showed a remarkable degree of perception - - no trees with just bushes for leaves, or perfectly square houses. She tried to imitate the life around her, like a mynah bird. Very _photographic_ images - - in intent, at least."

He thought of how Dinozzo sketched, spilling everything onto the paper as if he had gutted himself and given up only smeared lines. God only knew there had been enough in his brief sketch of Alex Kelly to rouse nightmares and prompt the attentions of shrinks. What had she drawn, besides detailed trees and realistic houses? Her father? A stranger?

"A drawing is not a trail of breadcrumbs, Special Agent Gibbs."

"You talked to her and it's your job to understand her," Gibbs said. "Are you saying you couldn't do it?"

"A child is not a puzzle you can put together."

"How many of these little chestnuts do you have?"

"I treated Marcia and Alex Kelly for the past four months," Mikell said, his mouth tightening as if someone had pulled back the strings. "My focus was on Marcia. She was more concerned for her daughter, but Alex dealt with her father's deployment far better than her mother did. I even told Marcia that I didn't think I was helping Alex through our sessions. She was a perfectly well-adjusted little girl. There was nothing I could do for her."

Dinozzo hadn't wanted this interview, but Gibbs should have made him take it. He would have done well, regardless of how he _felt _about it - - some smiles, some pointed questions, and some carefully-exhibited neuroses, and Dinozzo could have had Mikell licking his palm. Alex Kelly hadn't been interesting enough to keep Mikell's attention, gifted or no, and Gibbs felt the man's mind wandering even during their conversation. Mikell reminded him of a cat wife number two had kept - - fat and sleek and confident. Everything about him spoke to some hidden narcissism.

He tried again. There had to be something Alex Kelly had kept hidden, something Mikell might have found.

"Was she afraid of anyone?"

Mikell sighed. "She thought there was a ghost in her house. She heard noises at night."

"Noises?"

"Nightmares," Mikell said, his voice stiffening.

"For how long?"

"About a month," he said. He must have seen the warning look in Gibbs's eyes, because he looked away and put one plump hand on his desk and tapped his fingers, leaving smeared moon-shaped prints. "Normally, you'd be right to be suspicious. Ongoing nightmares could be a symptom of something worse, but in this case - - she had a friend who told her ghost stories. She used them to explain away the noises that she heard. It's a primitive way of coping with fear - - naming the unknown."

"Did the nightmares stop?"

"A few weeks ago, when her father came home. I think she felt safer - - she was probably only feeding off her mother's anxiety."

Gibbs stood. There was, at last, something that they could work with. He wasn't sure how it would knit the two murders together, but he might at least have a motive for the Kelly murder.

There had been noises in Alex Kelly's house, noises that had stopped when her father had finally come home. There had been noises and she had been scared. Mikell had never been equipped to see it from the angle of an investigation, when pushed, he could only explain it in terms of transference of anxiety, but Gibbs had a language of his own. He knew what this could mean. What had Mikell seen as unimportant? What had Dinozzo missed?

Who had Marcia Kelly let inside her house while her daughter was sleeping?

- - - - -

Pete locked onto him as he left Abby's makeshift lab. "Did you flirt with her?"

"I didn't," Tony said, "and she said to thank you for the drink, which in some twisted mating ritual you people have apparently means that you have an in. And I didn't speak Italian or smile too much or do a striptease or exercise any of my other powers, so you owe me one."

Pete smirked. "I'll give you two."

Tony paused. "You're generous when you think you're going to get laid."

"I'll ignore that. One - - I won't tell the lynch mob that's been dropping in here every hour on the hour looking for you that you were ever here." He wrinkled his nose. "No consideration whatsoever. I'm trying to work and they just want to beat you into a bloody pulp. They do it again and I'm letting Max fold the system into the electronic equivalent of a paper hat. That's favor number one."

"That doesn't count," Tony said. "You wouldn't have told them anyway."

"No, but I could have. Favor number two involves the paper hat trick."

Tony could only type two-fingered and while Pete had enthusiastically seized upon every illegal downloading software ever invented, he had never seen security systems as open invitations to mayhem and had never learned to hack. Max, their resident computer science major, moved internal files around as a matter of course. He had done it for Tony only twice before: once to reassign him from a sham burglary to a homicide and once to get him out of mandatory counseling after an undercover case. That was simple, though - - he had the feeling that Pete was offering him something more dangerous, something that wouldn't be discounted as a glitch if anyone took the trouble to look closely.

"What kind of hat trick?"

Pete folded his arms. "He can trash the internal messaging, get rid of the memos with your name in the text."

"Are there are lot of those?"

Pete looked away when he said no, so Tony knew that it was bad. Shit. He couldn't imagine what his inbox looked like right now. Lynch mobs, virtual and tangible, after his blood. It was tempting to let Max loose, to give him an open invitation to crush circuits and fry hard-drives, but . . . it wasn't like they wouldn't know. The fingers that had typed the memos would still be itching to wrap around his neck and they would only grow more frustrated. It wouldn't take them long to figure out who had deleted the messages and it would take them even less time to figure out why they had been deleted. Tony was the notorious favorite, like it was so hard to get on their good side. For God's sake, he'd made them love him with a few cans of Red Bull and some greasy boxes of pizza. But still - - everyone would know.

It must have come through, because Pete sighed. "Tony, they aren't looking for you to give you a slap on the wrist. They're talking about taking your badge and we thought it might be a good idea if maybe they didn't."

"I'd quit before they could fire me."

Pete scowled. "And _that's _spectacularly comforting. You're an idiot."

"I can explain String Theory," Tony said.

"You can explain String Theory because Theresa _taught _you how to explain String Theory, and even then, you say it like a freaking mynah bird. You don't have any idea what's coming out of your mouth. I _heard _you ask Joss if it was about _yarn_. You're an idiot and I should tell him to go ahead and clear the servers."

"You won't."

"No," Pete said, "I won't. But I still hate you." He looked around, as if checking for anyone lurking in the hall, and said, "Is it really bad this time, Tony?"

He had never needed to see the boot poised behind him to know that he was about to be kicked in the ass. Lucas had never understood that. All of the jibes were always pointed at him: _his _restlessness, _his _limited warranty. Lucas never got it. Sometimes Tony _knew_ when he wasn't what they wanted anymore, could feel it the way some people could feel storms coming through the healed lines of broken bones. And even if _these_ people still wanted him, even if Pete could get endearingly pissed off at him and even if Max would put his job on the chopping block to save Tony's, even if Theresa taught him String Theory and Joss taught him what it actually meant - - they weren't the ones paying his salary. They weren't the ones who could bump him down to patrol if he turned out to be just as much of a screw-up as predicted.

Sometimes he just knew.

"Yeah," he said. "It's pretty bad." He maneuvered the cell phone out of his pocket and called in a couple of pizzas. He could still see Pete blinking at him, blindsided, and he doubled the pepperoni and didn't look back when he walked away.

- - - - -

He found Dinozzo outside the hotel, leaning against a ridiculously pink stucco wall and shielded in aviator sunglasses that bounced all of the light onto the pavement sprawled at his feet. When Gibbs tossed the keys at him, he picked them out of the air with a studied grace, catching the keychain around his fingertip. Gibbs didn't have the time to admire it. Dinozzo would have to do something a hell of a lot more impressive than fancy footwork to get back in his good graces. He kept walking and let the kid pick up the pace behind him.

"You missed something in the Kelly interview."

"And you found it by talking to the shrink?"

"Marcia Kelly was having an affair," Gibbs said. "Alex didn't know."

He couldn't see Dinozzo's eyes behind the placid sunglasses. "If Alex didn't know, then how did you get Mikell to tell you?"

"He didn't know what it meant," he said scornfully. "Alex told him that she was hearing noises at night - - she thought it was a ghost and he thought it was her being anxious. But the noises stopped when Petty Officer Kelly got back from his tour."

"Just to play devil's advocate here - - what if it really was anxiety?"

He praised the timing that brought the two of them next to the car just as Dinozzo took off his sunglasses to squint up at the sky. He rounded against him, bringing him back against the passenger side door. He heard the scraping sound as Dinozzo's keys scratched along the paint. The widened eyes told him everything he needed to know: the kid was scared. Good. The sudden tension in the shoulders told him something more important: Dinozzo was angry. That was better than scared.

"I don't need you to be a devil's advocate," he said softly. "We're having a hard enough time finding the devil himself without you backing him up. You're working for me; follow my lead."

Dinozzo turned his head, looking out over the parking lot. "Nobody questions you?"

"Sure," he said, smiling. "If they've got the balls."

"So," Dinozzo said, "what if it really was anxiety?"

He stepped off and got in the car, waiting in the silence for Dinozzo to follow suit. After a few seconds, the driver's seat was filled and Dinozzo had his hands knotted around the wheel. He didn't repeat his inquiry again, but it was still there.

"That's the question you don't ask, Dinozzo," he said.

"Because I'm not one of your people?"

"Because you'd have to go in there anyway. You still have to ask her if she might have been screwing someone who wanted to screw her little girl. Don't ask questions if the answer won't change anything." He didn't give Dinozzo time to think about it: he would either get something sarcastically Zen in return or Dinozzo might roll his eyes and say something about fortune cookies - - if pressed for a response now, he would never take it to heart. "What did Abby give you?"

"Our killer left traces of hand lotion on the girls. Both of them were drugged. Seconal."

"Any drug convictions in any of the neighbors?"

"Haven't had time to check."

"Not good enough. You should have worked it out of the lab and called me."

"I couldn't stay there," Dinozzo said. He gripped the wheel harder now, his knuckles going white. "Trust me, it wasn't my choice. A few days with you and it would have been a vacation to only wear out my fingers doing searches. And hell, there even would have been pizza. But it was made abundantly clear to me that I should get out of the building as quickly as possible. Pete says I went from golden boy to scapegoat and, barring some kind of internal computer coup, I'll be walking a beat by the end of the week. I don't want to start walking it _today_, if you don't mind."

There wouldn't have been a Marine in the country who wouldn't have understood the anger in his voice: Dinozzo _was _the job, to the bone, with everything from his skin to his life a kind of wrapping paper that could be redressed. He had never had a chance. He could have been on his first day in Baltimore or he could have been on his last - - he still would have followed the case. And they would bust him down for that?

Somehow he didn't think so - - not that they wouldn't try, but he thought Dinozzo might be in Bangladesh by the time they shifted through the paperwork to demote him.

"Seconal," he said, as if they'd never talked of anything else. "You know what it looks like?"

Dinozzo gave him a withering look. "I'm not a rookie."

"Then you can look for it in the Kelly house. If her lover wanted to frame the husband, he might have left the reds on their property. You see if you can find them. I think the questions I need to ask will be a big enough distraction."


	7. Chapter VII

**Chapter VII**

The Kelly house had carpeting the color of coffee in the master bedroom. Tony was thankful that it was soft, at least. It was the kind that stole the sound of his footsteps and made him burglar-like in his silence, in his intrusion.

He could, very faintly, hear Gibbs talking with them in the living room.

He was supposed to be in the bathroom. Instead, he was creeping like a cat through the beehive of empty rooms, looking for any sign that grieving mommy and daddy might have had the drugs forced into their daughter's mouth. Or might have been given them. It wasn't something that would be easy to explain, anyway, if they came back to check on them. Gibbs had told him to be fast, but Marcia Kelly had started crying again, and Tony didn't think they would give a damn if he came back from the "bathroom" or not. They weren't thinking of him.

He wasn't sure what Gibbs was thinking, either. Whatever he turned up during this soft-footed search wouldn't mean anything without a warrant attached to it.

Then again, Gibbs didn't seem like a man overly concerned about specifics.

Medicine cabinets first, of course. The best place was always the most obvious one - - Seconal stuffed into a bottle of aspirin, into a sliding pack of birth control. The Kellys seemed to believe in keeping a clean cupboard: he only had to comb through a childproof Tylenol bottle and some multivitamins. Under the sink was mostly makeup and Marcia's hair products. He shook the boxes and listened for the muffled rattling of pills, but got only the answer of dye packets squishing against the cardboard side. Sock drawers. Shoeboxes. Jewelry cases.

Alex Kelly's bedroom.

There were crayons and coloring books scattered over the floor; dolls sitting in model trains. Tony crouched and stroked along a sleek toy caboose before prying it open at the sides, cracking into the painted plastic with deft and careful fingers. Nothing. He checked the linings of yellow rubber raincoats, the insides of bunny slippers. He turned out the pockets of winter fleece sweaters and found crushed sugar cookie crumbs and pieces of string. If the killer had stashed the Seconal in the Kelly house, he hadn't left it in Alex's room.

Suddenly it all felt futile again and he found himself forgetting why hand lotion and sedatives gave him the right to paw through a dead girl's toys.

At least it was better than what Gibbs was doing. It would be hell, Tony thought, to have to sit there and calmly interrogate parents with eyes rubbed red from crying, to have to ask and insinuate, to have to tell a man that his wife hadn't waited for him, to have to tell a woman that her lover might have broken her daughter. And to do that when he had already met them, talked with them, gone to the trouble of making himself trustworthy - - that would have been even worse. He would have done it, if Gibbs had asked, because Tony knew the score and knew that he was the one that did the talking. He knew that he could have done it, maybe even easier than Gibbs could. Quicker.

Searching for the Seconal might have been like digging through a haystack, but it was the easier job, the easier job. And Gibbs had given it to him.

He shut the door to Alex's bedroom behind him and moved on down the hall. He could still hear the raised voices from the living room, the harshness, and when he shut himself into the spare bathroom with its sterile light, he wanted to tear apart the walls to find something, _anything_ that would make this better than it was.

- - - - -

Gibbs had never liked making women cry, but he had gotten used to it, and when Marcia Kelly's eyes grew glittery and expansive, he hadn't even flinched. She wiped at her eyes with a Halloween-printed napkin, sweeping bats across her cheekbones, and he was surprised then that the tears didn't steam away from the intensity of the glare she leveled at him. He had _changed_ her, reassigned her from grieving mother to indignant wife, and for a second, the ferocity of her mourning was elsewhere. That meant more than tears. That meant, at least, that she had never suspected. He saw no sharp clarity of guilt in her face, no sudden question.

"I've _never_ cheated on Rob." She crumpled the napkin in her hand and a tearstained black cat crept out over her fingertips. "Not once. Not ever."

"Your daughter heard noises in your house," Gibbs said. "She never heard them when your husband was home. You told Detective Dinozzo that nothing was wrong, but your daughter was scared and you didn't even mention it."

"It had _stopped_," she said. "She missed her father."

"Not as much as you did."

"Exactly! I missed Rob more than Alex missed him, so why do you think that I would _ever_ let someone take his place while he was gone?" With a rush, the memory of her daughter came back to her and she seemed to retreat into the sofa cushions, her body trying to crawl backwards in time. "She woke me up and told me that there was a ghost in her room. I checked her closet, I checked under her bed, and I even let her sleep with me. There was no one in our house, Agent Gibbs. I locked the doors and even put _chairs_ underneath the handles sometimes. No one could have gotten in."

"Unless you let them."

It was too late for him to resurrect her anger, she was already gone. "I never." It was only a whisper. The goddess was gone and there was only a woman, thin and desperately broken, r left in her place. "I never."

Petty Officer Kelly had been so silent and still that Gibbs had almost forgotten him, but he stirred then and put his hand on his wife's thigh. She moved against him, leaning her head on his shoulder, and one strand of greasy blonde hair fell against her face. Gibbs looked away then, feeling numbly voyeuristic - - her wilting had proved to him what her anger had not - - and now he only wished that Dinozzo would hurry. How many rooms could there be in the house? He was searching for pills, not buried treasure, and he should never have had to look this long. Gibbs almost went after him - - there had been no lover, no reason for the Seconal to be stashed carefully away - - when Dinozzo came white-faced into the room, his hand clutching something Gibbs couldn't see.

"Buttercream."

Marcia Kelly's head lolled slightly towards him. "That's my lotion."

Dinozzo's eyes darted around the room, as if he were trying to see everything at once and understand what he had missed. "Your hands are chapped. You haven't been using it." He gave a sudden, nervous smile, not like his usually effortless ones. "Petty Officer Kelly, can I see your hands?" He splayed the offered fingertips and studied them, reminding Gibbs curiously of a manicurist. "Calluses. Your hands are all rough, too. You should have been using this. All-natural ingredients. Why would you buy something this expensive and not use it, not one of you? Did Alex use it?"

Marcia said, "She asked me to buy it for her."

Dinozzo was cradling the slender bottle like it was the holy grail, and Gibbs thought he knew: this was the hand lotion Abby had found on both bodies. This was what the killer had unintentionally left smeared all over the skins of his victims. No wonder Dinozzo had gloved up before touching it. No wonder he looked so suddenly _alive_, so pressurized with energy that Gibbs could hardly look at him. This _was_ their holy grail, or it could be, and it almost made up for the time he had spent turning the screws into Marcia Kelly's already shattered life.

"Was she wearing the lotion?" His voice was gentler now, because the kid had the good sense to know that the Kellys would have only seen his excitement as obscene, but Gibbs, who knew how to listen, could still hear it humming underneath. "The last day you saw her, was she wearing it or had it washed off? Some of this is gone."

Marcia's mouth was trembling. "I gave her a bath before she went out to play. She was just down the street. I only looked away for a minute - -"

Dinozzo cut her off. "The lotion washed off?"

"It must have," Marcia said. "She hadn't been wearing so much of it, and only on her hands, but I always put it on for her because I didn't want her to use too much - - it had been a while. I don't know how long. She forgot about it, like she forgets about her toys sometimes. She grows out of things so fast, I can't keep up."

"But she wanted it," Dinozzo said. He looked at Gibbs and his eyes were gleaming. "She asked you to buy this for her."

"Yes," Marcia said. "She said she liked the smell."

After that, Gibbs knew that he had to get Dinozzo out of there before the kid physically started vibrating with questions and all the things he wanted to ask and do immediately. Dinozzo was shaking with adrenaline when they got back on the porch, the bottle of lotion clutched in a plastic evidence bag. Gibbs didn't know if it was _only_ adrenaline or if it was adrenaline coupled with a lack of sleep, and got Dinozzo to sit down on the bench before he passed out. Dinozzo looked at him like he was crazy.

"I'm _fine_," he said. His hands were trembling. "Do you know what this means? _She knew him_, Gibbs. She recognized that scent. She knew him and she must have liked him, because if he had already been molesting her, the association would have made her keep as far away from this stuff as possible. She wanted him with her."

"Narrows it down," Gibbs said. He couldn't match Dinozzo's excitement - - he had long since outlived that kind of rush - - but he understood it. If they could get a Venn diagram of the Kellys' acquaintances and the Lachers', they could have a name without running searches for Seconal or trying to track sales of lotion. "You want to get some names from the Kellys?"

He hoped Dinozzo would have the good sense to know that was his best option. One of them would have to rehash the Lasher interview and Dinozzo had to see that expediency dictated that whoever took the Lachers would have to drop the lotion off at the lab for some cautionary trace analysis. If there really was an internal manhunt for him, he had better stay away. Would be damned inconvenient if the kid got himself reassigned at this point in the game. After he was gone - - well, Gibbs probably had enough pull to keep the kid from getting his ass-kicking on the record, but no one, least of all an outsider, could control what happened behind the scenes. Not that it mattered - - Dinozzo would probably pull up his stakes - - but it mattered _now_ and they needed to play it that way.

Dinozzo shrugged. "I know the Kellys," he said. "I'll stay here."

He said it so offhandedly that Gibbs couldn't tell if he had actually thought it all the way through, and the words themselves were opaque.

Then Dinozzo extended the evidence bag. "You want to drop this off at the lab on your way?"

- - - - -

Tony was halfway to the hotel when he realized that, for the first time since he had started working with Gibbs, he could actually go home. He had the list of names from the Kellys written down and double-checked for spelling. Under normal circumstances, he would have gone back to the station: hashed the whole thing out with Lucas over bad coffee, maybe, or chased down paper trails in the lab with Pete's They Might Be Giants CD playing on repeat. He should have gone _there_ by instinct alone, like a compass finding north, but instead he had found himself on the route to the hotel.

Dr. Mallard had given him the spare keycard, sure, but Tony wasn't stupid enough to think that meant carte blanche hospitality. Not stressing that his key was for an emergency didn't translate to an invitation for him to come around when they weren't there. Gibbs would call him when he had finished the Lacher interview and then they could compare notes.

There was nothing for him to do but wait and it only made sense to wait at home. He could finally go home, but now that he could, he didn't want to. They were _close_ now. He wanted to track Gibbs to the Lacher house and not wait for a phone call, he wanted to go to the lab and do something relatively pointless like track lotion sales, if only to have action. Purpose. But he didn't have those options. If he went back to the station, he knew there would be hell to pay. The situation wasn't bad enough for them to be sending anyone to stake out his apartment, but if he walked into the lion's den, he knew better than to expect to come out unscathed. They would probably blame him for the damn news release, too, because he was supposed to deal with the press and even if he explained that Lucas had hardly checked with him beforehand, he would still be the one held responsible.

That made the silence of his apartment look a lot better by comparison. There might even be some ham and rye in the fridge without something suspicious growing on it.

And the apartment would at least be untouched by the hurricane he had unwittingly stirred into life. He might be combing through the classifieds by the end of the case, but no one was going to put a baseball bat through his TV set because he had cast his lot in with NCIS. His face, maybe, but not his TV. No one stooped that low.

It was about results, he knew that. When the smoke cleared, he would have to either hand him the killer or his letter of resignation. The brass wouldn't be impressed by the nights he had gone without sleep or the connections he had made unless he gave them an ending: preferably one where he was the star. But he had no right to ask Gibbs to duck out of the spotlight at the end, no right to fake a lead he didn't have. Lucas had been wrong to do it but it would be doubly wrong for _him_ - - he knew these people and the scraps of Gibbs's almost accidental consideration had grown unexpectedly meaningful. He didn't want to stand up at the end and take credit for things he hadn't done and watch Gibbs and Dr. Mallard and Abby be pushed further and further away from him. They had been good to him and he owed them.

His apartment was freezing because he hadn't had a chance to turn on the heat yet, and gooseflesh was creeping up on his arms as he cranked up the thermostat.

_North by Northwest_ was on. He folded the cell phone into his hand and kicked his feet back on the couch, still trying to time his sleep with the crop-duster scene, and just as his eyes grew heavier than lead, the phone buzzed angrily against his skin.

- - - - -

The decanter of Scotch near Lacher's elbow had been steadily emptying since Gibbs had last seen it, and he watched as the lieutenant commander poured himself another glass with trembling hands. So that was what self-destruction looked like. Gibbs had almost forgotten. He said nothing: Lacher's daughter had been all he had. You couldn't pass judgment on a man who had lost everything. Bryan Lacher was a modern Job.

Gibbs kept his voice soft. "I thought you could help me, sir."

Lacher looked at him with lidded eyes. "But I called you to help me, Agent Gibbs," he said. "I remember what you did for one of my buddies a few years back. You really pulled his ass out of the fire. He talked about you all the time."

"I remember," Gibbs said, although truthfully, he didn't. Lacher had been too distraught to mention anyone's name over the phone and he couldn't press the question now. "I need you to help me find out who hurt your daughter. I need to get the names of all your friends, your close coworkers, anyone that might have interacted with Ellie."

"Everyone knows about Ellie. I have her picture on my desk. I tell everyone about my little girl."

His throat ached with everything he couldn't say to this man, all the promises he knew better than to make. He had been around the block too many times to guarantee justice. And he was sick of being gentle - - there was nothing left of Lacher for him to break, anyway. He straightened in his chair and let his voice sharpen.

"I need those names, Lieutenant."

If he had hoped for some miracle, for Pinocchio to jerk on his strings and come to life, he had been sorely mistaken. Lacher only studied him with those impassive, dazed eyes. He wasn't military enough to snap to attention through the darkness of his grief. He must have put everything on that girl, after his wife had died, he must have loved her for how she carried her mother with her and for her own sake, and now he was gone. There were some things that all the strength in the world couldn't overcome.

"I don't know anyone who could hurt Ellie," Lacher said.

"With all due respect, Lieutenant, that's my decision to make. Not yours."

Lacher reached again for the glass of Scotch. "I can't think of everyone," he said quietly, "but there's an address book in the library table."

Gibbs found it - - a slim red leather volume with names and phone numbers slotted into precise columns. Lacher must have been an organized man before the world around him had been knocked askew. He flipped through it and went to the K section, vaguely hoping to find Rob Kelly's name in one of the available spaces, but there were only two entries: a Jon King and a Kraft's Hardware. He closed it and returned to the sofa.

"Do you mind if I use your bathroom?"

Lacher sliced his hand through the air in a permissive gesture, already having crawled back into the comforting embrace of the Scotch.

There was only one bathroom linked to the long hallway. Gibbs searched through the cabinets and drawers, but there was no Buttercream lotion carefully placed among the toothbrushes and containers of bubble-bath. What caught his eye, instead, was a small box of Band-Aids with colorful Disney cartoons dancing around the bandages. The box was coupled with a small bottle of hydrogen peroxide that sloshed when he touched it, revealing empty space. He thought of Lacher kissing his little girl's scraped knees. He stood, knocking the box to the side, and closed the cabinet so quickly that it bit at his fingers.

When this was over, he was going to spend the weekend alone in the basement, where the smell of sawdust would keep everything else out.

The high-pitched, atonal ringing cut through him. He needed to get Abby to hardwire the damned thing to vibrate, or at least not beep so cheerfully at him. With the mingled scent of peroxide and liquor still stinging him, he brutally yanked the phone from his pocket and stabbed at the button. Dinozzo. Well, it had better be good. It had better be good because Lacher was a wreck and the address book seemed useless and the Band-Aids had toppled over onto the floor. None of it was Dinozzo's fault, but he didn't - - couldn't - - care.

"Dinozzo, _I _call _you_, you don't - -"

"There's another body," Dinozzo said. His voice was perfectly calm: it might have been ironed flat. "Eight years old. Strangulation again. A routine patrol found her body in the park playground, propped up against a slide. Friar's Park. It takes up three blocks near Ellie Lacher's school, you can't miss it. Tell Dr. Mallard. I need to take care of some things before I meet you there. You'll find the place okay."

Another time, Gibbs would have pounced on that and told him to get his ass down to the scene, but the absolute placidity of Dinozzo's voice made him think differently. "Dinozzo?" There was no answer, but no sudden hiss of a disconnected line. He hesitated. "Tony?"

"The victim's name is Marie Bayer," Dinozzo said, and of course, then, Gibbs knew. "And I'm calling you to tell you to secure the scene before every string leading to this investigation is pulled away from you. I'm calling you before I'm calling _him_, dammit, so just go. I'll see you there after I talk to Lucas."


	8. Chapter VIII

**Chapter VIII**

Tony let him do it, even stood still without turning his face away. Lucas's hand would have skidded then and turned from him, but that wasn't what was needed, so he only closed his eyes in the moment Lucas hit him. Solid contact. Two of the guys, Ray and Benny, moved to brace Lucas from either side and hold him back, but they moved slowly, without really wanting Lucas to stop. Tony was waiting, face hot and aching, for it to happen again when he realized that they had already caught Lucas and were supporting him from both sides. He hung between them, all ropy muscle and rage, not fighting but not surrendering, either. He was no Petty Officer Kelly, already stone etched with saline. If he could have, he would have torn Tony to pieces with his bare hands.

Tony came closer anyway, because it was Lucas and because he needed to, and could think of nothing at all to say.

He used to talk people down from rooftops. He could make a gun fall out of someone's hand.

But this was Lucas and his daughter was dead and Tony had no clue, really, what he was supposed to say or what he was supposed to do about that. He almost wished that Lucas would hit him again, because he had understood that part.

"Lucas," he said. "Lucas, I don't know."

'You son of a bitch." It was said without anger, as if Lucas meant nothing by it at all, but his eyes were agate and his hands were still tense steel, ready to break away from the men restraining him and fall forwards in some primitive and deadly murder. "He killed her. I could have found him and he killed her. He killed my _daughter_ and he left her at the playground where you used to push her on the fucking swings."

"I'll get him," Tony said. He was doing all the things he knew better than to do: he was making promises and fumbling with his words, he was showing Lucas that underneath all the bluffing, he really only had a pair of twos. He closed his eyes and tried to pretend that Lucas was someone else, someone that didn't matter, but he could smell the blood trickling from his nose and yes, he really had pushed Marie on the swings a few times. Nice girl. Lucas said that she had a crush on him. "Lucas, I'll find him."

_I'll _get him and _I'll_ find him because he could hardly mention Gibbs. No one knew yet. No one could have told Lucas that Tony had traded everything away, really: had given freely what had been theirs and what had, specifically, been Lucas's. _I gave away your daughter. You wanted to do that when she got married, but I beat you to the punch and offered her body to someone you hate. Because I thought it was what needed to be done._

The desperation on his face must have been plain, because Ray, who had never liked him, said quietly, "We already sent someone to talk to Emily." He said it as if Tony should be thankful that that was one less thing to worry over, but the guilt only folded itself together and magnified - - he had forgotten Emily, forgotten that Marie's mother might want to know what had happened to her daughter. Ray didn't notice, only slide his hand along Lucas's shoulders with an ease Tony could only envy and bitterly want returned to him, and said, "We'll take care of him. You go find the bastard. I hope he tries to run for it."

But Tony couldn't leave that easily, couldn't accept that kind of grace and half-hearted forgiveness. He needed to achieve more than that, he needed to know that he had helped, in some stupid and pointless way: he needed to know that he had done more right than standing still when Lucas had hit him.

He needed to talk someone down from a bridge. He was what they had made him to be, then. Damn. They had finally told him to go do his job and he had to finish this first, had to know that Lucas would go on as something more than anger.

"Lucas," he said, "I just - -"

"Just go," Lucas said, and turned away.

He hesitated, feeling clumsy and stupid, the words slipping away from him when they had always been there for strangers. He wiped the blood off his chin and watched Lucas's eyes move across his face, implacable and cold. That was how they were, then. This was what happened when it didn't happen to someone else. His own grief nudged at him, but Lucas's was a maelstrom that pulled it from underneath his skin to be devoured. They had never taught him - - and he had never learned - - a platitude for this. He was left with only the truth, only the shock that had seized him.

"I never thought that this would happen."

It might have been enough, but - -

"Tony," Lucas said, "_you told me it would_."

- - - - -

The Bayer girl looked like her father. She had the same smooth dark hair, tied into a gleaming ponytail, and the same bone structure underneath the fragile, sunburned skin. Gibbs looked away when Ducky zipped her into the smooth black plastic. A playground. Even this late in the evening, he doubted that the killer would have risked acting in such a public place. It must have been a dump. From far away, Marie Bayer would have looked liked alive, balanced against the slick aluminum slide. No one would have known she was dead unless they came closer, saw her blue lips and the blood on her jeans.

She had torn off one fingernail, her knuckles were bruised. No Seconal for her.

"He moves too fast, Ducky. Bayer went live not twelve hours ago. This bastard is killing quicker than we can process the evidence." He swiped a hand over his face and scraped his fingers over the few drops of chilled sweat clinging to his skin. "I'll have to have Dinozzo work out some press release to get parents to keep their kids indoors until we have him."

Ducky looked up. "Three dead children should be warning enough, Jethro."

"We can't take that chance." He looked at the slight form of the body underneath the plastic and sighed. "I should have had her and her mother moved to a safe-house after Bayer's interview. Didn't think of it. He was off the case, but that doesn't mean the killer knew that." He found the right angles to photograph the slide. The bloodstain at its foot had dried quickly in the crisp air. "If she wasn't drugged, I want to know right away if you find that lotion on her skin. We need to know if this is a copycat or part of the serial."

"As soon as I can get the proper samples, I'll send them to Abby," Ducky said. "I'll make sure to stress the priority." He lifted himself up from his crouch with a slightly pained expression. "And where do you go from here?"

As much as he wanted to press forward from this new, third body, there was nothing at the scene that whispered some vital clue. He would have to tie himself back into the mundane traces, as if there were no urgency and no new purpose. He needed to cross-reference Lacher's address book with the names Dinozzo must have pulled from the Kellys, but he would have to wait for Tony to finish up with his partner first. If he had to fly solo for this part of the investigation, he was down to tracking lotion sales and running names from drug cases. He wasn't sure what kind of access he could get to the Baltimore resources - - drive or no drive, it might be easier to head back to D.C. The hotel was for convenience only; it lacked the kind of equipment he needed.

And he would have to give Bayer and the ex-wife the formal interview that Dinozzo couldn't.

"I guess it's time to see if Dinozzo can coax his people into playing nice long enough for me to run a few searches." He kept his voice carefully neutral - - even trying to be quiet, Dinozzo's footfalls still crackled on the dried leaves, but Gibbs knew the kid thought that his entrance was wholly soundless. "What about it, Dinozzo?"

"Had a mutt once with ears like yours." Dinozzo walked past him to study the blood on the slide, his face expressionless. He was sure that Dinozzo thought this act was convincing, too. "Had to have him put to sleep, Gibbs, really sad. And no, I'm not going to be able to convince anyone to play nice, not now. Next time you want a damned liaison, pick the favored and not the prodigal son. I can get you access to the lab, that's it. Anything else is going to end with both of us being run out on a rail."

"And autopsy?"

The mask slipped briefly and Dinozzo gave Ducky a very faint smile. "All yours. Dr. Linell doesn't like working on kids anyway, she'll be happy to have you."

It took Ducky a few minutes to get enough help from the frustrated and bewildered patrol LEOs to have the body moved; Gibbs stood back and let him work. He welcome the reprieve. He would have to pick up the reins again as soon as Ducky left, and that meant both resuming the search for a link between the Lachers and the Kellys and dealing with why Dinozzo apparently thought that it was inconspicuous to slip on sunglasses at dusk.

The gravel turned underneath his feet. "Did you get the names from the Kellys?"

Dinozzo produced a few folded slips of paper, delicately stenciled on the edges. Marcia Kelly's work. "I'm not sure how complete it is. God knows she was distracted." He smoothed out the creases. "At least she put an easy limit on things. Most of the names are women. If Lacher was a widower, I take it he gave you mostly guys?"

"Should be easy enough to check," Gibbs said. He didn't reach for the address book, though. "You might want to put some ice on that eye, Tony."

Dinozzo sighed and took off the glasses. The hidden black eye was plum-colored and already puffy, but it looked like Dinozzo would be able to see. "I'd have been more impressed if you'd told me to watch the bloody nose," he said. He touched the bridge gingerly. "Must not be any swelling, then. Good to know."

Actually, there _was_ a little swelling, but Gibbs had been distracted by the glimmer of the sunglasses and what he had known to be behind them. He didn't contradict Dinozzo, though. He didn't want to admit to paying that much attention. He stuck with the obvious, and kept his gaze flush with Dinozzo's good eye.

"You should have made sure there was someone else there. He might not have stopped at getting in two hits."

"He didn't have much of a choice," Dinozzo said. "I had two guys from homicide in with me." That should have kept Dinozzo from getting hit in the first place, but Gibbs knew there had to be more to it then that. He got his answer when Dinozzo carefully touched the black eye and said, "They weren't exactly in a hurry to stop him. A good fistfight is a hell of a lot quicker than dealing with IA and it goes a lot better with your run-of-the-mill sense of justice."

"You weren't the one at the playground tonight."

Tony shrugged. "Doesn't matter. It's not like cause-and-effect is that simple, anyway." He put the sunglasses back on, even though they must have thrown the world into complete darkness. "The lotion on the bodies. Was it from the bottle we got from the Kellys?"

"Abby says not unless our killer reworked the inside of the bottle in order to throw us off."

"Seems unlikely," Dinozzo said. "Not to mention entirely too Machiavellian. So we're stuck checking names and addresses - - unless you want me to run through all the files we have on drug possession and interview everyone in Baltimore ever linked with Seconal. And believe me, it's quite the lengthy list. Had a college kid just last week mix some reds with vodka and overdose at her birthday party. Happy twenty-first."

"Any big players?"

"Not off the top of my head. I worked undercover for Vice last year, but that was coke. I don't keep track of every high school dropout dealing out of his garage."

Gibbs considered it. Seconal wasn't quite minor league, but it was hardly batting with the heroin and cocaine that would be more heavily monitored. He could tell Dinozzo to try and trace the reds anyway, but it would be useless before it would be helpful, and he could hardly afford to sacrifice his one man to a wild goose chase. They would have better luck with splicing together the "friends of the family" names: he could turn Dinozzo on those and take the Bayer interview himself. No need for Tony to have a matching set of black eyes.

"Go back to the hotel and see what you can make out of the names."

"Using the very sophisticated phonebook method," Dinozzo said. "All right. Fine. We have enough files in the room for me to get you a list of drug pushers."

"I'm not going to comb through garages, either."

Dinozzo said flatly, "You're going to interview Lucas."

"One of us has to," Gibbs said, watching him carefully. He was starting to hate those damned sunglasses and he wished Dinozzo would take them off again. He already knew about the black eye behind the shades. All Dinozzo was hiding now was his reaction, deep inside the cave-shadows. "You know it can't be you. No cop has any business questioning his partner."

"Get behind the bigger picture," Dinozzo said. He slid his hands inside his pockets. "He's my friend, Gibbs." He said it plaintively, like a kid begging for one more game of basketball with his buddies in some back alley. "I know he's a jackass. He's always been a jackass. And he traded me like a used baseball card for the chance to _not_ bend over for the press, but that doesn't mean that he wasn't around when I needed him."

"You _were_ there for him," Gibbs said. He understood loyalty and wouldn't slight Dinozzo's, but that didn't mean he would compromise for it. If Dinozzo talked to Bayer, they wouldn't end the day with even a scrap of new information. He would let Bayer spin him like a top. Even if he didn't, it wouldn't hold up for a second in court - - any defense attorney worth his salt would tear the story to pieces. It would have all the earmarks of a cover-up. "You're there for him now. You just can't interview him, and you know it."

"I don't have to like it." He put his hand on the slide, a few feet above the bloodstains. "Then again, I haven't liked any of this."

- - - - -

The last time Gibbs had seen him, Bayer had looked like a Hollywood detective, entirely too sleek and well-groomed to be quite real. The cameras must have loved to linger on his expensive suits, his pretty face, his white smile. They would love him even more now, with his new ragged edges and the tearstains like clear varnish on his face. The skin on his knuckles had split apart from the collision with Dinozzo's face and thin, maroon streaks of dried blood zigzagged across the back of his hand. He had been disassembled, left to be more horror movie than crime thriller, and whatever quicksilver rage had fueled him during his encounter with Dinozzo had been wrung out of him. He smoke irritably, hastily, stabbing the cigarettes into the ashtray before they had burned down completely. Gibbs watched them suffocate in their own smoke, giving Bayer's edginess time to turn to impatience.

"If Tony and I had been working this from the beginning," Bayer said finally, his voice corkscrew tight, "it would have ended after the first body. You _never _should have made it past my crime scene tape, you son of a bitch."

"The first two girls were Navy brats. My jurisdiction, not yours."

"And my daughter?" He dug his fingernails into one hand, leaving perfectly-manicured, shapely welts in the skin. "She was my jurisdiction."

"I'm sorry about your daughter," Gibbs said, and he was. She had been a beautiful little girl, propped up like a baby doll against the slide with the blood from her struggles, from her rape, coated like Kool-Aid on the aluminum. "But I didn't kill her and neither did Dinozzo. You should know that. Either you help us, either you talk to me, or it takes longer. You can't want anyone else to be where you are now."

"Don't be so sure of that," Bayer said. His voice was an ice-pick, chipping cruelly away. Gibbs waited for it to strike deeper, for Bayer to turn the threat into flesh, into a blow, but he only lit another cigarette and gripped it too tightly. "But this was my little girl. My Marie." His gaze sharpened. "Why didn't you send Tony?"

"Would you have talked to him?"

"There's a lot of things I could say to Tony," Bayer said. He took a drag off the cigarette. "But none of them would help. What are you looking for? You don't want to know the names of my friends because you're looking at a forest, not at the trees. Serial cases don't hook up with individuals. And Marie died because of what happened _in_ this investigation, not because of anything before. So what do you want?"

"Have you ever worked Vice?"

The question surprised him and Bayer took too long to answer, as if he wanted to be prepared. "It was my intro. I did two years there before I moved to homicide."

"When Dinozzo wanted you, at the beginning, he said it wasn't because you were his partner. He said it was because you had been around longer. He said you had connections, knew things about the city and the scum in it that he didn't. I want to know about the connections you have in Vice. Anyone who could get me Seconal."

"Reds aren't primetime," Bayer said. For the first time, his voice wasn't sharp or cold, it was only quiet, contemplative. "Not primetime, but they're a little more specific. College kids deal pot, ecstasy. The big names in town run the horse and the coke. Crystal meth comes out of the boonies, that's not in-town. Seconal is a smaller field. You have a lot of users and a lot of local dealers, but if you wanted something more than a kid giving them to his friends in Ziploc baggies, you chop your numbers down."

"To how many?"

"I don't know the figure."

Gibbs turned away, looked out the window. Hopscotch squares were still traced in chalk on the wide sidewalk. "But you can find me someone who would know," he said, trying his best to sound almost disinterested. He needed Bayer to work through this. "You can get him to talk to me. Dinozzo can't play both sides anymore. But I've known Vice detectives before. They get dirty. No one in that department would think twice about feeding you a short-list of suspected dealers. They'd be happy to see you take down the man who killed your daughter. They aren't the ones that have to clean up the bodies in the morning."

"There's a flaw in your plan," Bayer said. He looked out the window, too, and Gibbs knew that his eyes must have caught on the hopscotch court. His mouth tightened around the cigarette. "When I get the names of the dealers, why would I give them to you? I can lean on them just as much as you can. I can find out all about their biggest customers. Like you said, Vice won't have to clean up the bodies in the morning."

"You'd run the risk of killing the wrong person, for one thing," Gibbs said, keeping his voice level and patient. "You don't have a profile to work with. You pull your gun on some scared junkie who wants the reds to get through the night, and you rot in jail before you find the man that killed your daughter. But if you give the names to me . . . it's like the finishing touches on a picture. And I haven't taken down the wrong man yet."

Bayer's eyes were hungry. "You're that close?"

Gibbs smiled, and lied. "Yes."


	9. Chapter IX

**Chapter IX**

Gibbs had sent him to the hotel again to play connect the acquaintances, but Marie Bayer's death seemed to ring in his ears, distracting him. His nose felt horribly tender and his eye had grown too colorful and too puffy to successfully hide behind the glasses. After testing the speech a few times in his head, Tony worked it out: he would _have_ to leave the hotel to go buy some aspirin to make his bruises stop protesting. It was a decent enough excuse to leave things the way they were, and he even scrawled a note on the back of a rape charge: _Gone to get some painkillers. Be back soon. P.S. – I took all of the booze out of the mini-bar as hazard pay_. He signed in with a flourish. Never let it be said that he wasn't willing to hammer his own coffin shut.

He had forgotten Emily Bayer. Hell, he wasn't even sure if she _was_ Emily Bayer now. She might have shaken off the name as easily as she had shaken off the man himself. Tony hoped that, for his own sake, she had kept it: she had told him her maiden name once but it kept slipping between his fingers. He should have been the one to go and tell her, the way he had been the one to tell Lucas - - the department would have only sent a uniform, still so green he would have sap dripping from his enforced-sympathy smile. It would have been a slight. Emily had been a detective's wife, once, and they would have wrapped around her tight if Marie had died_ then_. If Marie had died _then_, it would have been the damn chief himself at her front door, holding his cap in his hands, but she had walked out, and the cloistered department was just as willing to play wounded lover as Lucas had been.

Tony didn't owe Emily the way he owed Lucas, but he was still the one that should have been there, and he was willing enough to turn his other cheek for her if she grieved the way her ex-husband had: quick and violent, with no room for melancholy.

The operator he reached was ridiculously slow and he found himself gritting his teeth and wishing passionately for a switchboard. Eventually, though, she managed to spell Emily's address out to him in ridiculously obscure phonetics. The little house he found was far enough away from the Lachers and the Kellys for the staggering to seem intentional - - the killer ensuring that no simple Neighborhood Watch program would turn him up.

He could turn the addresses over to Pete, who could probably force them onto some kind of Cartesian plane to give them meaning and direction. It would be a shot in the dark, with just the three points, but, like the address book cross-references, it was worth a try.

Not that he'd spared even five minutes for the address book and the Kelly stationery since the thought of finding Emily had first come to him.

"Selective focus, Gibbs," he said to the silence of the car. The feeling of guilt still knotted in his gut, misplaced - - he had never claimed to be Gibbs's wingman.

_You promised to follow orders_.

Okay. Sure. He'd done that and he'd even meant it. He would splice together the names the second he was back in the hotel, and he would even share the liquor if Gibbs asked very nicely, but t his had to come first. Because _they_ had come first, Lucas and Emily, who had thrown him a first-year anniversary party with a cookout and sparkly fireworks the cracked open and spilled lightning confetti across the sky. They were part of his past and even if Tony always left, he always said goodbye first. No point in leaving loose ends.

To his surprise, the door opened as he climbed onto the porch. Emily stood back in the shadows, propping the screen open for him with one foot, and he accepted the invitation silently. The house was clean, the floorboards smooth and sleek with polish. The furniture all had rounded, childproofed corners. He followed her winding path, but she stayed ahead of him, never turning around. He was left with her back - - her small shoulders and her bobbing blonde ponytail. She made her way to the sink and held a glass under the already streaming faucet, then offered it to him a moment later.

Only then did she turn around to look at him. Her eyes were pinkish, her mouth tight.

"I thought you might show up," she said tonelessly. "I'm just surprised you didn't get here before the meter-maid."

"I'm sorry," Tony said. "I - -"

"Went to Lucas," Emily said. Tony let her believe that, because it was easy and almost true. "I guessed that one." She gave him a long look and he knew that she was seeing the black eye, the skin on his nose that was rapidly turning plum. "But I knew you'd make it here eventually. You were always one of the good guys."

The water was warm and metallic. "You were always the only woman I knew that believed it."

He put the glass down on the counter when she came closer. She leaned against him and he put his arms around her, feeling her heartbeat at his own chest. Lucas should have been there, holding her, Lucas or some boyfriend, but she only had him, and he held her as tightly and as best as he could. Her face was dry against his shoulder. Stronger than Lucas. Stronger than him. He wanted to introduce her to Gibbs, almost. He breathed in the scent of her hair: expensive shampoo that smelled like raspberries.

"I used to be a little bit in love with you," she said. He didn't answer. It was nothing he didn't already know. "Do you remember your first year here? The party we had?" He nodded against the slight curve of her cheek. "The kids bullied you into playing Slip-n-Slide and you said you'd have blisters on your stomach for weeks. I was with you when Lucas set off the fireworks. I wanted to kiss you. I should have. You would have taken care of her, Tony. You would have been able to keep her safe. A good father."

He kissed her on the cheek. "I would have been a shitty father, Emily," he said. "And the wrong choice for a husband, too."

She pulled back and looked at him steadily. "A good friend," she said.

"Maybe," Tony said. "Maybe that. Sometimes."

The sudden noise outside startled him, made him flex his fingers in anticipation of reaching for the gun strapped to his hip. The footsteps on the hollow wooden porch echoed so loudly through the little house that he understood why Emily had been waiting for him at the door. There would have been no chance of any lover entering silently here - - this wasn't the Kelly house, insulated and warm and safe from harm. They must have stood so frighteningly vulnerable against the man who had wanted to hurt Marie. His jaw tightened and he headed for the door, stopping her from following him by throwing out a hand.

"It might be - -" How to explain Gibbs? "It might be someone I know. Let me check."

"It's the press," she said hollowly. "They've been coming by all day."

"Then I can make them leave."

In truth, he _expected_ Gibbs to have that kind of awful and uncanny timing. He even felt his muscles relaxing at the knowledge that he had been caught at his own game. Gibbs had smacked him with a folder in the hotel and might do it again, given provocation, and Tony was pretty sure this qualified as provocation. Necessary and right, but still.

He was so completely expecting Gibbs that even when he saw the face through the screen door, and even as he swung it open, he saw that bad military haircut and those steel eyes right until the moment the man on the other side dropped his camera and started to run.

Tony had no time to think. He kicked the camera out of his way, into the house, and picked up the pursuit. He could already hear his heartbeat pounding: he had been running on catnaps and candy bars since the first body and now it was coming back to take a vicious bite out of him. He made himself stretch harder, press his feet deeper into the pavement and take longer steps, as if he could make the distance between himself and the rapidly-diminishing figure shrink instantly. But it was too late - - getting the camera out of the way had cost him precious seconds. If it had been a vehicle pursuit, he might have had a chance. Right now, the man running before him had more sleep, more food, and more fear. He would run faster.

And he did - - until Tony could no longer see him.

He braced himself against one of the cars that lined the street and called Gibbs, no longer caring about the note he had left or the people he might be leaving behind. He waited only for the answering bark before he said, "We had him, Gibbs. We _had _the son of a bitch. It's Prestor. Max Prestor, the peeping tom who left us standing on his _goddamn porch_."

- - - - -

Under other circumstances, he would have asked what Dinozzo had been doing halfway across town on the losing end of an on-foot pursuit, but Gibbs knew who owned the house. And under other circumstances, Dinozzo would have earned himself a real ass-chewing for disregarding orders, but it was hard to argue with his results. He had gotten the APB out on Prestor as quickly as possible and then gone to rendezvous with Dinozzo. Given the point-blank instructions to _wait_, he wasn't surprised to find Dinozzo's car still parked on the street. At least it was something. Dinozzo wasn't flying solo . . . not yet, anyway.

Not yet, but he was getting there. He was entirely kinetic by the time Gibbs arrived - - Dinozzo seemed to either be all rest or all motion, and the enforced stillness had made him twitchy and irritable - - and he had his hand on Emily Bayer's shoulder, his fingers drumming against her breastbone in unconscious, rapid taps.

"We _had_ him," Dinozzo said again. Gibbs had next to no patience for people who thought that repetition made things more significant, and he scowled at Dinozzo with no effect. "But no, no, he didn't _act_ guilty enough."

Something about the way his hand tightened on Emily's shoulder then told Gibbs too much - - Dinozzo was twisting under the weight of knowing how close they had been so early on. It was bad enough for Gibbs to remember the door swinging shut in his face and knowing the two bodies that had come after that, but he had never played uncle to any of the victims. He had taken the hit from Bayer and now probably didn't even regret it. Idiot. He hadn't been the one in charge. It hadn't been his call to make.

"Your nose is bleeding again," Gibbs said brusquely. "Go clean yourself up."

With a dull nod, Dinozzo detached himself from Emily and wandered down the hall.

"I don't know you," Emily Bayer said. She had surprisingly cool eyes, letting him see nothing. "I thought I'd met everyone in homicide at some point."

As much as he could, he elaborated on Ellie Lacher and Alex Kelly and how he had ended up steering an investigation headed straight for hell with Dinozzo playing tour guide. He couldn't console her - - she seemed unreachable. Dinozzo might have been able to withstand that wintry façade, but if she was softer underneath, she wasn't going to show him that. By the time Tony made it out of the bathroom with his face damp and scrubbed pink, still clutching a handful of tissues, Gibbs had not even made an indentation.

"APB?"

"What do you think, Dinozzo?"

"Yeah. Sorry."

He needed Dinozzo out of the house - - the kid had no more business questioning Emily than he would have had questioning his partner - - but their priorities had shifted too rapidly. The names back at the hotel had dropped in significance and the APB out on Prestor had instructions tacked on: all the calls would go to Gibbs, personally. The only thing left was to send Dinozzo to Prestor's house with a hastily-cobbled warrant and hope he could turn up Buttercream and Seconal. But Gibbs couldn't send him in without backup, not after how things had gone so far. It was one thing for him to run a scene without anyone guarding his six, it was something else for Dinozzo to do the same.

He chose a different tack. "I have some names I need you to run," he said. "Seconal."

Tony took the slip of paper without objection. "You'll call me if you need me, right?"

No wonder Dinozzo kept those sunglasses with him all the time. With his eyes revealed, his bare face was one overlarge question mark: _do you still trust me? Are you pissed off?_

"As soon as I'm done," Gibbs said. "Now get out of here."

When he was gone, Emily said, "I was glad that he came to see me." She sounded very quiet and very slightly remonstrating. "But I know you didn't want him here. Lucas always said that questions could get messy, even when he wasn't with a suspect. And you want to keep Tony's hands clean . . . for now. Don't you?"

"He's been a cop for years," Gibbs said. "He knows how things work." He flipped open a notebook and uncapped his pen, settling in to the familiar ritual as if Prestor wasn't outside, slipping further and further away from them. The APB had better work. They could confirm Prestor's involvement if Dinozzo could place him buying Seconal, but confirmation would be no good without the warm body. "Is the name Max Prestor familiar to you?"

"It is now."

"Before," he said.

"No," she said. "Never. But Tony told me what he looked like, and I . . . I know his face. He'd been coming by all day. They all had."

"Mrs. Bayer?"

"The reporters," she said, and her voice hardened. "I was a cop's wife for long enough that I know nothing makes the news like fresh blood. I should have known that the feeding frenzy would start . . . but I couldn't think of it then. I went to the door and there were two or three of them, photographers and cameramen in tow. He was one of the photographers. He broke the flowerpot at the bottom of the steps."

"He wasn't a photographer," Gibbs said.

"I guessed that much. But you can't tell me who he really is, can you?" She stood and turned, walking over to the low, unlit fireplace and fondling one of the small pottery knickknacks on the mantelpiece. "Because you don't want me to be able to find him. Shouldn't you be more worried about what you tell Lucas, Special Agent Gibbs? Or did Tony walk into a door earlier?"

He could have told her the truth: that if protecting Max Prestor were his first priority, she would be the one he would guard himself against. Lucas Bayer burned too brightly for long plans. In another day, his rage would vanish and he would be staring at Dinozzo's battered face and wondering how he could have done it. Bayer was dangerous, but it was the kind of danger that could easily be snuffed out between his fingertips. Gibbs knew better than to dismiss a woman's anger: and Emily Bayer seemed all too patient.

"We haven't told Detective Bayer, either," he said.

"You should," she said. "He loved her, you know. Not me, not all the time, but always Marie. And Lucas blames anyone he can. You'd do better to make sure it's someone you don't mind losing, Special Agent Gibbs."

- - - - -

"I don't know how comfortable I am using something you dug out of the evidence fridge as an icepack, Pete." It was token resistance, however, and Tony didn't fight the hand that closed around his wrist and pushed the so-not-an-icepack up to his eye. "Anyway, it's not like the eye's swollen shut or anything."

"Oh," Pete said, "well, if the _eye's_ not swollen _shut_, then you must be perfectly fine. And anyway, that's not even evidence. It's something Joss _put_ in the evidence fridge for God only knows what reason."

"I feel so much better."

Pete extended his hand. "Names. Drug lords. Now."

"We don't call them drug lords if they deal Seconal, Pete. We call them bastards who couldn't get their hands on coke." Still, he produced the paper. "I was under the impression that since you work _Trace_ I'd be the one feeding names into a computer. Or is this another one of those things where you don't want me to speak Italian because you're afraid women's underwear slide down because I can fake an accent?"

Pete crossed his arms. "This is actually one of those things where I'm very busy but still making time for you to be an asshole."

Tony handed the paper over. "I don't have any cash on me. Just so we're clear. I mean, there's no way for me to call you in a pizza or magical Red Bull delivery service at this point."

"Every once in a while," Pete said, already settling down at the computer, "I throw you one for nothing. Now stop bleeding and let me work."

"I feel all warm and fuzzy inside," Tony said, and spun his stool around. The still-not-an-icepack smelled like his high school locker room. "This is TLC right here."

"Do we need to talk about this?" Pete asked without looking up from his keyboard.

"About what?"

"About Lucas punching you in the face. Because that really sucks and under normal circumstances, I'd ruin his life for you or something, but . . . not really appropriate right now. But that doesn't mean that this isn't hard for _you_ and I didn't know if anyone had, you know, asked if it was. So."

Tony carefully moved the icepack down. "Are you asking me if I want to talk about my feelings?"

Pete, finally facing him, looked distinctly uncomfortable. "Yeah."

"No."

"Oh, thank God," Pete said, "because I had no idea where I was going with that." Still, he stayed facing Tony, still looking ill-at-ease but oddly determined. "Hey, Tony? I know you said that things were bad before and then they took a nosedive, and you were _already_ talking about leaving, and I just wanted . . . I'd do more than this for nothing. You're a good friend. And keep that icepack up, you moron."

Tony obediently moved it. "You're the second person today that's told me I'm a good friend."

"Tony, you're opening up to me."

"Sorry," he said. "I won't do it again. Tell me when you've got something, okay?"

He closed his eyes to Pete saying something about how if he'd been thinking about keeping key facts of the case entirely himself just for fun, and even though he tried to think about Gibbs promising to call him and Pete and Emily saying he was a good friend, his head still saw the bigger picture: the girls whose fragile bodies had built the stage he was standing on.


	10. Chapter X

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I've already apologized for my lengthy absence on my profile, but I really should do it here, too - - it was a combination of a hundred different factors that led me to put this away temporarily, become embarrassed because it had been so long, and then wait longer because I was embarrassed. But I wanted to see how it all worked out in the end and I hope that, even after this long wait, you might, too. If not, I'll understand.

- - - - -

**Chapter X**

"Our best choice is Aaron Deacon. Thirty-six, arrested twice for possession with intent to sell, but he has enough cash to work behind the scenes. His family's old money and when the rich get bored, they get bored in style. Trust me." Dinozzo tapped a few keys and an enlarged floor-plan appeared on the plasma screen. "Deacon spends half his time in Vienna and the rest of it in the family mansion, apparently with a six-pack of geisha girls and one really wicked-looking bodyguard. He's suspected in connection with some higher-profile Seconal deals and some liquid X on the side."

"You have a warrant?"

Dinozzo snorted. "On Deacon? Forget about it. They tried to spring an undercover operation on him six months ago. It didn't take."

"Define not taking."

"You couldn't pry Deacon's security system apart with a crowbar, Gibbs. There's no opportunity to even set up a plant. Deacon collects his employees overseas, sponsors them for green cards, and has them live inside his house. Apparently the pay's nothing to sneeze at, either. The guy's untouchable."

"No one's untouchable, Dinozzo."

"Well, you're going to need kryptonite."

The lab tech Dinozzo had introduced as Pete Woley snorted. "Comic book references don't work for you, Tony." He edged in front of Dinozzo and practically assaulted the computer, making the floor-plan disappear and replacing it with a case-file. "And don't bullshit. The sting didn't work because they used the wrong guy, not because Deacon imports his dealers. That's what happens when you use a uniform to do a detective's job."

"Pete," Dinozzo said patiently, "you hate detectives. You say that we steal your Dr. Pepper."

"Tony, no one has time for you right now." Woley stabbed a few keys and enlarged Deacon's photograph. "You want something on Deacon? Three hours and some sweet-and-sour pork will get you his entire computer system, and I'll even throw in a digital copy of everything we got from him when we were prepping Tony for undercover."

Gibbs considered it. "Can you work with Abby?"

"I can do just about anything you like with Abby," Woley said, smirking, "but, to be fair - -"

"- - and not disgusting," Dinozzo said.

"- - she'd actually be working with Max. I just like getting all the credit for the collective efforts of the underlings." Apparently satisfied that he had wormed an agreement out of Gibbs, Woley turned his attention back to Dinozzo. "I'll take the food on credit this once. Now get the hell out of my lab before someone notices that you were enough of an idiot to walk straight back into the lion's den. You can even keep the ice-pack."

Dinozzo shifted the Petri dish back up his eye. "Yeah, still not an ice-pack. Doesn't Joss need this for something?"

Woley waved a hand. "It's okay, he's probably just trying to cure cancer again."

It was the first time Gibbs had actually seen Dinozzo relax and the first time he realized that Dinozzo had never been relaxed before - - he had been fooled by the grin and the smart-ass remarks, but this lack of tension was different. It wasn't a bad sight. If it had come down to any other situation, if he'd had to decide whether Dinozzo caught ten minutes of shuteye or ten minutes of halfway decent conversation with his friend, he would have gone with this—but that wasn't the choice before him. It was either indulge his streak of sentimentality or get Dinozzo angry enough to chase after Prestor, and Gibbs had never been a man to choose the lady over the tiger.

He cuffed the back of Tony's head. "Get it in gear, Dinozzo. I haven't heard anything about the rest of these names yet."

"Because focusing on anyone else would be a waste of our time," Dinozzo said. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms behind his head and that was it - - that ease had been knocked out right out of him. "If Deacon wasn't responsible for the drugs, he'll know who was. And because I was more focused on getting those pictures developed. Which I did. Does that get me anything?"

"Depends," Gibbs said. The tension against his heart stretched out like elastic. "Did you get anything worth seeing?"

"Not worth seeing, no," Dinozzo said, "and nothing that I'd want to look at twice, but enough to be worth mentioning. Pete, can you?"

Woley made no move towards the keyboard, and the frown he had sported for the entirety of their conversation deepened into a scowl. "First of all, I told you to get out of my lab, and it's not like I'm lacking reasons why you should just do as I say. Secondly, what's wrong with your hard copies?"

"I need clarity."

Gibbs could hear the shift in tone. Dinozzo had kept his voice light enough, but there was a steel cable running right through the middle of that sentence, and if Woley thought that this request was open to discussion, he would be making a very nasty mistake. Gibbs hoped that he knew better than that. He watched Woley watch Dinozzo and finally, thankfully, saw him realize that things had changed.

"Give me a second," Woley said. Like magic, he made the case file disappear and brought up Prestor's film in slideshow format. He clicked through the first few pictures before anyone could object, but as he passed an off-center landscape, Dinozzo snapped his fingers and pointed. Woley paused on a snapshot of Lieutenant Commander Lacher in his Sunday best. "What? There's nothing case-related before this."

"Don't be so analog. Go back two."

"You're using that expression completely wrong, just so you know," Woley said. He retracted two slides and brought up the landscape again. "If you've got a gazebo fetish, do the rest of us really need to know about it?"

Gibbs ignored that and opted for squinting at the photograph. It couldn't be random. If Dinozzo had only wanted to stop the show sometime before the shot of Lacher, he could have ground it to a halt before now. Woley was right, though - - there didn't seem to be anything particularly special about this one. Not even a good shot. The gazebo in question was too far to the left, and nothing else in the frame was even noteworthy. Just open land. He'd been willing to suspend his disbelief long enough to curtail an immediate reprimand, but he still couldn't see anything, and so Dinozzo was pushing it.

"You've got five seconds," Gibbs said. He leaned on the back of Dinozzo's chair and waited.

Dinozzo did not turn around, but Gibbs could see his grin reflected in the computer monitor. "Pete, go back one."

Woley clicked. There was a slice of a house, part of a window, part of a tree branch.

"Okay, forward two, one past the gazebo."

The shot before Bryan Lacher was of a playground. Gooseflesh tickled Gibbs's arms. It was night, and the only light came from the flash and from the scattered streetlights, but Prestor had clearly been staking the place out. Gibbs could see him all too clearly, could guess all too well what he had done. Had he gone there only at night in the beginning? Had he leaned back on one of the freshly-painted benches and closed his eyes and imagined? Had he caressed the oily bars of jungle gyms, still slippery from sweat? Where had he walked? What had he done? He knew that he was breathing too hard in and out, the added air spiking his consciousness feverishly high, but he couldn't stop.

Dinozzo touched his arm briefly.

"Not what, not where," Tony said. "You're gripping, Gibbs."

He made himself relax and wrestled with the nausea that resurfaced as he looked at the photograph again. He did his best to unlearn the context and focus on what Dinozzo had said, to see whatever Dinozzo had noticed that he himself could not - - not what, not where - - and then, with his eyes half-closed, he saw it.

"Go back two," he said. Woley did. "Forward again." They were staring back at the playground, the hunting ground, and Gibbs could see it now. "Damn, Tony. That's the best catch you've made yet."

"We _knew_ it," Dinozzo said. He was still smiling. "We knew he wasn't guilty."

Woley flicked the monitor. "When the two of you are done?"

"Look at the leaves," Dinozzo said. "This is the same roll of film and I wish to God it was time-stamped, but this is good enough. The picture of the house has got that branch sticking into the frame - - apple blossoms. Flip forward and you've got leaf-raking. He went _months_ without taking a picture, and all the rest of these are recent. If he'd been our guy, if he'd been building to this, he would have used up ten rolls of film just getting between spring and fall, but he didn't. He stopped. And he started again. That's not an obsession. That's a _hobby_. _This _jump is connected to his _apparent_ jump from voyeurism to murder. I'd bet you anything."

"No one here is going to take that action, Dinozzo," Gibbs said. "Prestor didn't kill anyone."

"So I'm not actually an idiot," Dinozzo said to Woley, who was still blinking at the scattered leaves in the photo with obvious fascination.

"I wouldn't go that far," Woley said, "but - - I think you're off the hook for takeout today."

"What are the rest of these?"

"The _rest_ of these are incredibly disturbing and aren't going up on my screen, particularly when it took you five minutes to explain your great leaf epiphany and I've already told you - -"

"To get out of your lab. Yeah, Pete, we were listening. The rest of these will be good enough on hard copy, anyway, Gibbs."

The steel had been frayed by Dinozzo's enthusiasm; none of them were in any danger anymore. Even if Dinozzo had insisted on staying much longer, Gibbs would have pulled rank and gotten him out of there anyway - - he had no intention of losing his liaison to the sheer stupidity of the Baltimore PD. He wouldn't have noticed the time lapse without Tony's help. So he nodded his assent and let Dinozzo duck outside to collect his film. He flicked through the rest of the photographs and received no argument, but he was aware that all of Pete Woley's attention was now focused on him, and it was more distracting than he'd thought. He closed the viewing program and turned around, meeting Woley's glare with his own.

"Something you wanted?"

Woley crossed his arms. "Do you know what you're doing?"

He didn't pretend that Woley was asking about the case; he had no intention of insulting either of them. "If he hadn't agreed to leave, I would have made him."

"Because you need him," Woley said. "Because he saw what you couldn't."

He didn't bother to deny that, either. There wouldn't have been a point.

Woley listened to that silence with his head cocked to one side, as if he could hear everything that wasn't being said. "Don't let the fact that you're better than Lucas Bayer go to your head. And don't let him get shot."

That was not what he had expected. He waited, but Woley didn't tack anything else on, and so he asked the sixty-four thousand dollar question on his own.

"And don't let him get fired?"

Woley rolled his shoulders back into his chair. "Does it matter? He's already gone. And I've already cared _way_ too much for one workday, I don't need to cry on your shoulder about having to deal with a long-distance friendship. Go look into the usual suspects and I'll gift-wrap Deacon's hard drive for you and hand it over within a couple of hours."

"Anything more than three and I'll just break in and _take_ his hard drive."

"All of you people are the same," Woley said. He rolled his eyes and turned back to his computer. "No wonder Tony likes you."

- - - - -

Tony had ditched both sunglasses and possibly-cancer-curing Petri dish back at the station, because the swelling had gone down and sunglasses after sunset were more conspicuous than a little puffiness. It wasn't as bad as it could have been, no matter what Pete had thought—he had seen what Lucas could do in the gym - - but that hadn't misled him. He knew that it was only an accident that his head was still on his shoulders after that little go-round. He tried to think a little less about what it meant that Lucas hadn't even tried to pull his punch and a little more about how the traces of sympathy he had gotten from Gibbs probably meant that he wouldn't get shot for screwing around with the mini-bar. Probably.

He was learning how to shift his weight in the car seat so that he didn't get thrown against the dash or the door every time Gibbs decided to test the laws of physics. He rode out another violent stop at a red light, caught his breath, and said, "Dispatch is going to call you when someone finds Prestor, right? Not me?"

"You aren't my go-between, Dinozzo, and you sure as hell aren't going to be my receptionist."

He probably didn't have to worry. Gibbs hadn't left him in the lab, after all - - had even stooped so low as to compliment him on catching the season shift in the Prestor photos—but there was no guarantee that Gibbs was pulling his punches, either. If he had to get a dressing down for running off to Emily Bayer, he wanted it while he still had the black eye for pity potential.

He eased into his sunniest voice. "What did you and Pete talk about?"

"Whether or not we think you get paid by the word," Gibbs said.

"I'm a lot of fun on stakeouts." They started again and no matter how much he dug his heels into the floor, he got thrown back. "Lucas always said so. I do voices, too. Accents, impersonations - - you should really hear my James Bond - - a couple languages - -"

"Almost sounds like that Deacon sting was tailor-made for you," Gibbs said. "Until they gave it to someone else." He lifted his gaze to the rearview mirror just long enough to make eye contact. Tony looked away. "Didn't figure Woley would have cared if it hadn't been you. Was that when they discovered that you were their PR golden boy?"

Gibbs had left that door wide open for him and there was a moment when Tony thought about stepping through - - it was a decent enough excuse for why he had been shunted to the side - - but he shook his head. He was a convenient enough resource that Gibbs would not drop him because of a rumor, but if he lied and Gibbs found out - - Tony had the feeling that that would be a whole new ballgame. And he needed to see this case through.

"It came on the heels of another undercover case," he said. He looked out the window and tried to see straight through his reflection. "They thought I'd get coked up. That was the theory of choice about how the Martinez assignment went to hell."

"How _did_ it go to hell?"

"In a hand-basket," Tony said shortly. "You know a better way of getting there?"

He saw the road curve up ahead and started to pull his face from the window, but Gibbs made the turn as smooth as silk.

Hotel parking lot.

He rubbed his good eye. "I thought we were going to hit the streets. Comb through the neighborhoods and see how many of the petty dealers we can find."

Even as he said it, though, he knew that it was a bad idea. They didn't even have the right questions to ask. They could throw Prestor's name around as much as they wanted, but there was no guarantee that he had even been involved in the drug purchase. If they focused too much on the Seconal, they risked not seeing the bigger picture until it was too late. Gibbs had missed the time lapse in the photographs because he couldn't see past what that playground shot represented and if Tony could not see past Lucas's help, he would miss something, too.

"Bad idea," he said into Gibbs's silence. "I get that. But what are we doing here?"

Gibbs turned the key in the ignition enough for the engines to quiet but not enough for the radio light to fade out. His face was lime-colored in the dark. "We're here because you left the contact lists on the bed when you went after Emily Bayer. We still have work to do."

Had he actually wanted this? He thumbed the door handle. It had gotten darker since they had left the station and he did not remember why he thought it would be better to have this conversation with no one else around. When Gibbs had backed him up against the car before, he had told him not to ask questions unless he could face the consequences; then he had asked anyway and then Gibbs had answered. It could happen again. Gibbs had smoothed out that last turn, after all. Tony took his hand away from the door.

"I'm not going to apologize for that," he said. "And not just because it led us to Prestor."

"No?"

_You would've done the same_, he thought. He refused to say it because he had no business even thinking it, no real reason to believe that it was true, and no excuse to understand Gibbs well enough to believe it despite all of this. He watched the clock change and said, "No. I had to see her. I wasn't wrong."

"No," Gibbs said, "you weren't." The whole car went dark and he opened his door. "Come on, Dinozzo. I want current phone numbers and addresses to go with every name on those lists before the lab has Deacon's files. Take the Kelly list. You can sleep when you're finished."

This last bit was given without the slightest hint of generosity, as if Tony had not been working off catnaps and interrupted nights since this whole thing started, as if he were just a machine that sometimes needed to be powered down. Tony was offended until he thought that compassion would really be worse. He had needed Gibbs's pity to temper his anger, but he didn't need or want it in their other interactions. An offer was an offer. And sleep in another hour was better - - he was beginning to think that he would have to wait until he was dead.

He winced. Bad choice of words.

He held on tighter to the packet of film. They had gone through the pictures while the car was still parked outside the station, shifting through the location-shots (playgrounds and schoolyards), the Lacher photos (some of the father, but most of the daughter, swinging, running, smiling at her daddy), and the Kelly ones towards the end. He had watched Gibbs more carefully than he had watched the photographs, waiting to see if that dark and impenetrable anger would settle over him again, but this time he was all business.

Tony thought: _business_.

That was an awful lot of film that had never been developed. If their killer wasn't Prestor, why hadn't anyone purchased the film and insisted on the destruction of the negatives?

_Because business wasn't the point._

"You know," he said, listening to his footsteps slide through the parking lot gravel, "if someone used Max Prestor to take the photographs, they didn't do it to get background info."

"Yeah," Gibbs said, "I was wondering when you'd get to that, Dinozzo. Thought you were going to stick with that gazebo all damned night." They stepped into the buttery light of the hotel lobby and Gibbs turned and raised his eyebrows, half-smiling. Tony took a step to the left of that raised hand and then stopped when it made contact with his shoulder instead of his head. "And if they photos weren't for background - -"

"Then our killer already has background," Tony said. It felt like swallowing an icicle. He thought about the acquaintance run-throughs that had made his eyes glaze over only a few hours before. "Gibbs, we might have something here. Prestor was our Stranger Danger guy, but most murders, most abductions - -"

"Do you really think you have to quote me the stats, Dinozzo?" Gibbs palmed the elevator button. "Because if I wanted to know if you remembered all your seminars, I would've asked you for the odds of a serial killer stopping once he's gotten used to the taste of blood." Tony opened his mouth but Gibbs stopped him, slashed his hand through the air. "And once you answered, I would have reminded you that it means that we don't have a lot of time to waste on you proving that you're smarter than Bayer thinks you are."

His foot turned towards Gibbs mid-step and he nearly lost his balance as it landed.

"Pete was the one that said I was an idiot," he said evenly. "Not Lucas. You mixed them up."

"No," Gibbs said. "I didn't." He leaned against the elevator wall. "For right here, right now, you're mine, Dinozzo. Act with me the way you act with him and we're finished. I don't have time for you to spell everything out to show that you know what you're doing. You were right to go see Emily Bayer and you were right about the time lapse in the photographs. You stop being right, it won't be because you didn't remember what they wrote in your rule book."

Tony looked at his blurry reflection in the elevator door. "I was just saying."

_Lucas likes me_, he wanted to say, as sullen and petulant as a kid, but they both knew that that didn't really mean anything in the end.

_He never thought that I was good enough._

"Boston," he said. He stepped out of the elevator as soon as he could. "When this is over."

Gibbs was two steps ahead of him and he stopped walking; turned around. Tony could see him thinking and he stopped, too, because maybe it was time to grow up and stop choosing his jobs by stirring a bowl of alphabet soup, and he thought that maybe - - and that he wouldn't mind, that there had to be some reason he had gone along with all of this - -

But Gibbs just said, "It isn't over yet, Dinozzo. You don't make plans until I say so."

There was still Boston. Somewhere between what he had to leave and what he really wanted.

"Right," he said. "I'm on it."


	11. Chapter XI

**Chapter XI**

Dinozzo had fallen asleep on top of the covers after crossing his last tee and passing his pad of hotel paper into Gibbs's waiting hand. He was a dedicated sleeper. His eyes closed, his head hit the pillow, his hand grasped his cell phone, and he was out. Nice efficiency.

Gibbs kicked off his shoes and settled down across the other bed, lining the torn pieces of hotel paper in a row across the nightstand. In the halo of light from the lamp, he could just make out the names. There was not a match between Lacher and Kelly but that proved nothing. In cases like these, even the slightest and obscurest acquaintance could have noticed the girls. He felt useless. Photographs, lotion, drugs, and black threads on one side of the line; three dead little girls on the other. That was no balance.

And he had no way to tip the scale.

He sat up; rested his head in his hands. There would be no sleep for him. He envied Dinozzo, because Dinozzo was young, and the bodies and blood that his youth intensified could also be lost in the intensity of everything else. In sleep. In sex. In the bottle. They could forget. And they would go on, spinning between horror and distraction, convinced that it could get no worse. Gibbs knew better. Worse was to not feel enough. Worse was to know that he used to feel everything. Worse was being unable to sleep simply because he longed to sleep; worse was wondering if he wanted those few hours of quiet more than he wanted justice. No rest for the wicked. Give me your tired, your poor - -

_Your dead children. Your baby girls._

Give him Ellie Lacher and her yellow sundress. Alex Kelly and her broken skull. Marie Bayer and her torn fingernail.

If he were in the mood to count casualties - - and no one would know if he did - - he could add more names to that list. Bryan Lacher, with his confusion and his Scotch; the Kellys and their roughened hands; Emily Bayer telling him that even when her husband had not loved her, he had always loved their daughter.

And Tony. His bruise and his exhaustion and his pathetic excuse for a work environment. He had almost asked - - because Tony had wanted him to, and because Gibbs had never been stupid, and never as terrible at reading faces as everyone thought - - but there was not enough time. When all of it was over. When they could breathe again. Right now, he could not afford to let Dinozzo know that he had proved himself, could not afford to let him relax. He needed the best. Not that rationalizations, not the lines that Dinozzo would have fed to Bayer - - Gibbs had made it clear that he had no use for that - - but the drive. The anger. The need to be recognized, the need that had let Gibbs play him and would now let Gibbs use him - - if Gibbs wanted to cross that line again.

He had crossed a lot of lines in his career. Most of them never let him back on the other side. Do something once, his commander had told him, and you'll end up doing it forever.

He stood, walked back and forth, hating the waiting, hating how he needed the phone to ring.

He knew that most of it was guilt. He had promised all of them that he could fix the situation, had promised that he could fix it quicker and better than anyone else, and now they all waited for results that he had not produced. Guilt because he had no answer yet and guilt because he knew how easily cases could freeze over and leave him with no answer at all. And if that happened here, if he couldn't find the answer, then everything he had done, all of the casualties, all of the sacrifices - - none of it would mean anything.

Marcia Kelly hadn't broken until he'd accused her of cheating on her husband.

Do something once, and you'll end up doing it forever. He had thought that she had the answers that he needed.

He'd been wrong.

He tore away their last piece of hotel paper and wrote, _Kelly house._ That was all that he needed to say and all that he wanted to write, but he knew Dinozzo, so he added, _Touch the mini-bar again and lose a hand. _It was as good a way of any to explain that this was different from when the two of them had left Bayer in the room, as good a way as any to explain that even if he envied Tony's sleep, he was also thankful for it. If Dinozzo couldn't learn to read between the lines, then Gibbs didn't have time for him anyway.

"My very own letter? You're not going to say that you took my kidneys, are you?"

Gibbs dropped the pen onto the bed. "Dinozzo, why are you awake?"

Tony rubbed his eyes. "Because you were leaving."

"How could you tell the difference between me moving and me leaving?"

"You're going to ask me? How would I know? I was asleep." He sat up and leaned back against the headboard, lacing his fingers together behind his head. "You _were_ leaving though, weren't you? Did we get the Deacon files?"

Gibbs shook his head. "No. Just wanted to take care of something." He crumpled the note in his hand, poked one finger through the paper. "I won't be gone long. Go back to sleep."

Another vigorous rub of the eyes. If Dinozzo did that any harder, he'd end up giving himself a lobotomy with his index fingers. "I'm all right," he said, answering a question that Gibbs knew he hadn't asked. "I can come. Give me a minute to brush my teeth or something, though. I'm stuck on, like, my third day of morning breath."

"Bed, Dinozzo. I don't need you for this part."

"But you could use me," Dinozzo said. He split a yawn in two with a grin. "Couldn't you?"

The hell of it was, he probably could. Tony had a talent for smoothing out rough edges, for spinning gold from straw. Given even the clumsiest of Gibbs's infrequent apologies, Dinozzo could probably produce something finer, something that would actually heal. He could use him. A mouthpiece, a translator—but that wasn't fair. He didn't need to pry open that grin just to push his own words inside and he didn't need to make Dinozzo _his_ PR wunderkind, too. Even he wasn't that much of a bastard.

"I could but I won't," he said. He buried the note in his pocket and let the spare change weigh it down. "Follow-up with the Kellys. Nothing you need to worry about."

Dinozzo looked at him for a long time before he nodded. "Yeah, all right."

Of course Dinozzo understood. He had gone to see Emily Bayer, after all.

Gibbs had his hand on the door knob when he heard the static hum of Dinozzo's cell phone, a furious little sound like a burst wasp's nest. He sighed; stopped. The Deacon files must have slid in under the three hour mark - - he owed Abby a Caff-Pow for that, and Dinozzo probably owed his lab geeks a few slices of pizza. He leaned back against the door and waited for Dinozzo to snap his phone open and kill that awful buzzing noise, but it kept up: Dinozzo was staring at the phone as if he couldn't remember how to answer it.

He crossed his arms. "You think you'll get to sleep just because you can pretend you don't hear it ringing?"

"It's not that," Dinozzo said. He bit down on his lip, then looked slantways at the door as if he were planning an escape. "It isn't the lab. It's dispatch."

"And if they can't find you, they can't fire you?" His first question had been designed to cut straight through Dinozzo's reluctance, but now he kept his voice low and neutral, testing the waters instead of diving right in. If he thought that the situation was that bad, he would chuck Dinozzo's phone out of the window and then call Morrow to figure out the most direct way to turn a Baltimore detective into an NCIS agent.

"I think I have another twenty-four hours before I have to worry about playing hide-and-seek," Dinozzo said. It didn't sound like too much of a lie. "I'm avoiding them, they aren't hunting me down. Dispatch, though - -" He looked away again, this time toward the window. Gibbs could not see his reflection in the glass. "Never mind. Not your problem."

He opened the phone with a flip of his thumb. "Dinozzo."

Gibbs watched him, tried to time him. After maybe five seconds, Tony closed his eyes; after the first thirty, he opened his mouth and licked his lips, as if he wanted to say something; a second after that, his words got away from him in a harsh intake of breath; after a little more than a minute, he opened his eyes again, looked down at where his feet were tangled up in the patterned comforter, and hung up the phone. He never said anything more than his name. Gibbs didn't know for sure if he wanted to know what he had been listening to.

Tony pressed the heel of his palm to his forehead and invented a new facial expression: some awful, cramped twist of the mouth that he might have meant to pass for a smile.

"You all right?"

He ignored the question. "They'll keep calling. Probably for a while."

"Then turn the damned thing off."

"I can't. They know I can't, that's why they'll keep calling. I can't risk turning it off as long as there's still the slightest chance that I'll get a legitimate call. Pete, maybe. Lucas. And when they find Prestor, they're ten times more likely to call me before they call you." He swung his feet down to the floor. "I can handle it, Gibbs. It's not Chinese phone torture."

And, because he had to know, "What is it?"

"Like I said, not your problem."

The same neat shuffle that Dinozzo had done earlier, when he'd wanted to avoid talking about the skeleton in his closet. But Gibbs wasn't in the mood for it now, and besides, Dinozzo was wrong. This _was_ his problem. It was interference, harassment, garden variety disruptive. He wouldn't be at his best with the phone snarling at him every few minutes and Dinozzo would deteriorate quickly enough with someone whispering in his ear all night long. And neither one of them would end up getting any sleep. His problem.

"You don't get off the hook on this one, Tony," he said. "Why'd they call?"

He didn't like the way Dinozzo suddenly yanked both feet up off the floor again, like he'd gotten burned on contact. His eyes burned, too - - Gibbs thought that if he had been close enough, looking into those eyes would have been like squinting through isin glass to see into a stove. Anger. Guilt. Fear. If he hadn't been the kind of man that could do this - - the kind of man that had broken Marcia Kelly, too - - he would have used the pause to retract the question and erase that look. He wanted to.

But he _was _the kind of man that could do this. If Dinozzo knew instinctively how to smooth ruffled feathers then Gibbs knew instinctively how to make them stand up in the first place. He had a natural talent for finding weakness. For exploiting it. In a sick sort of way, he sometimes even liked it - - his own natural acidity could appeal to him, the way Dinozzo probably used his honeyed tongue to flatter himself a time or two. There was a very fine line between a gift and a sin. Most of the time, Gibbs couldn't tell the difference.

"Lucas plays basketball with the guys in dispatch," Dinozzo said. "Dated a few of the women, too, during and after his marriage. The lab likes me and dispatch likes him. Three marriages, Gibbs, you must know how divorces work. Call it split custody. They chose up sides."

He could guess that they wanted to do more than just arrange to see Dinozzo on weekends. He waited without speaking, because Dinozzo would give up first and fill the silence. He would not have to ask again.

"They wanted to know what it felt like," Tony said. He flipped his phone open and closed. Practicing. "To know that I killed her. To know that my partner's daughter died because my warranty ran out and I wanted to move up the food chain. Wanted to wear a suit to work."

There was nothing Gibbs could say that would make that go away. That wasn't his gift.

"You told me before not to ask questions if the answer wouldn't change anything." He opened and closed the phone again. "Should take your own advice, Gibbs. I'm still going to have to answer it the next time it rings."

There was nothing he could say to change that, either.

He thought it over. "NCIS isn't particular about wardrobe. You've met Abby. Tell them that the suit isn't mandatory."

Dinozzo tilted his head to the side. Gibbs couldn't read his expression. "You're telling me that the next time someone calls and asks how it feels to know that I got a little girl murdered, I should say that at least the suit isn't mandatory? That's your voice-of-experience comeback?" He didn't wait for an answer, he just rolled his eyes back as far as they would go and started laughing. "I mean, it'll just turn into, hey, Tony, nice job whoring yourself out so you can wear _jeans_ to work, but – -"

Gibbs let him laugh, because it was better than the alternative, and because when Dinozzo remembered it with a clearer head, he'd see the comeback for what it really was: a job offer. A cheap consolation prize, in the end, but the only one that Gibbs could offer. Something for them both to take away from this mess.

- - - - -

For the next hour, Gibbs slept and Tony screened phone calls: he switched his ringer over to lights only so that the noise wouldn't wake Gibbs up, which pointedly circumvented what he was sure was Gibbs's main reasons for staying with him when he should have gone to the Kellys. Tony didn't need a babysitter.

He took three more of the dispatch calls, making himself listen to at least a minute of each one, even if he had to get through it with his fingers pressed to his temples and his teeth biting into his tongue. He'd never even thought some of the things that they said to him. On the fourth call, he lost his temper, locked himself in the bathroom, and told them all to go to hell, that he was just trying to help, that he was doing all that he could. The fifth call pushed him in the opposite direction: it made him bitter, made him funny. He used Gibbs's line. He gave them his father's work number and said that if they really wanted to develop a bad opinion of him, they should talk to dear old dad about how his only son had never entered the family business. He told them about how sweet the mini-bar was.

He kept his mouth shut on the sixth call. It was only ever funny once.

He thought that the seventh call would kill him, but it turned out to be Dr. Mallard. Tony could have cried from sheer relief.

"What can I do for you, doctor?"

"Thankfully, my dear boy, you've just done it. I've been phoning Gibbs for the last half hour, but I'm afraid his mobile phone must have worn down. He can never seem to remember to recharge it regularly, but at least _you_ seem to be more sensible. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to contact you, either."

Tony put his forehead against the mirror and smiled at himself, turned his inevitable bark of laughter into a cough. "Yeah," he said. "I've been keeping my phone on. Never know when you might get one of those important phone calls. Gibbs is asleep right now, but I might be able to wake him up without losing a hand if there's a good reason - -"

"Autopsy results," Mallard said crisply. "He usually does like to see the body."

"Yeah, so do I, but he'll probably come down by himself. Anything else I should pass on?"

"You might advise him to let _you_ have some sleep as well," Mallard said, which made Tony wonder just how bad he sounded on the other end of the line, "but I suppose you aren't likely to tell him. At least remind him to charge his battery - - but that might end rather badly, as well. If you don't mind taking a few of his messages for the duration of the case, I believe the only message you'll have to give him concerns the autopsy results."

He breathed against the mirror and drew shapes. "I don't mind," he said. Triangle. Square. "I'm here if you need me." Diamond. Heart.

"Well, I certainly appreciate your help. Technical know-how has never been one of Jethro's strong points, I'm afraid - - I remember one incident a few years ago when he actually had trouble determining why his computer wouldn't work after he had spilled his coffee across the keyboard. He gave IT quite a bit of trouble . . ."

Tony let him talk, but he listened more to the tone of his voice than to his actual words. The dispatch callers had all had voices like barbed wire; after six blistering phone calls, Dr. Mallard sounded better than anything Tony had heard in hours. But it was an easy distraction - - too easy - - and so he made himself interrupt, made himself cut the call short.

After all, he had to keep the line open for his inquiring public.

He splashed some water on his face and went out to find that Gibbs was already awake, changed, and working on a pot of coffee. "Don't need much sleep," he said levelly. Tony couldn't tell what he had heard through the bathroom door, if he'd heard anything at all - - he was at least sure that Gibbs could have guessed at where he was and why, and to have his stubborn independence yanked out from underneath his feet irritated him.

"Autopsy results are in," he said. "Thought you might want to check them out yourself."

Gibbs set the coffee cup down on the table. "And you thought you might want to stay away?"

"In another twenty minutes, I'll probably have access to Aaron Deacon's computer system. Now, my computer skills are pretty bad, but I have a hunch I'll have a better idea what I'm looking at then you will." He had a host of other, more obvious reasons, but there was no reason not to lie when both of them knew the truth. "Plus it'll give me the chance to order breakfast on your expense account again."

Gibbs looked him over. "Rule seventeen, Dinozzo."

"Rule seventeen. Did I fall asleep during Sunday school when God invented a few more commandments?"

"Rule seventeen is that if you drink the last of the coffee, you make a fresh pot."

"So definitely one of _your _commandments," Tony said. He could handle this. He picked up the remote and flipped through a few static-clogged local channels before arriving at a Technicolor western. "Must be nice to know that you can get your bad guy and your good girl in under two hours. All the bad guys wear black hats so you know who they are. And even if you die, heaven had to be better in Hollywood."

He always wanted to see a back-lot. He'd dreamed about it all the time when he was a kid, and he'd always imagined that it would smell like greasepaint and fresh popcorn, that he'd be able to see all the big-screen heroes and all the glamorous women in their costumes, his perfect Hollywood spacemen and cowboys and sailors and detectives. Undercover work, exhausting and exhilarating and dangerous, was the closest he had ever gotten to peeling back the movie screen and stepping inside.

Gibbs was suddenly standing too close and Tony knew that he'd been quiet for too long, that he'd nodded off. The world eased back into focus.

"Coffee," he said. He saw his phone light up again. "Best way to greet the morning. If I hear anything about Prestor, I'll call you."

He spread the photographs out on the bed like a fan and let his hand drift over them; maybe one of them would work like an Ouija board and pull his fingers straight down to the answer. He had gotten lucky once. He could do it again. The lights in his peripheral vision flashed twice and sent dispatch to his voice mail.

"And they'll call you?"

So Gibbs knew. The man who couldn't remember to charge his cell phone had worked out that the flashing lights were another ring-tone.

Tony smiled. "They always do. I'm the go-between, remember? The guy everybody wants."

He let his hand fall down on the photographs. He needed to be lucky again.


	12. Chapter XII

**Chapter XII**

The autopsy tables were designed for adult bodies. The longer Gibbs looked at the space between the pink soles of Marie Bayer's feet and the end of the table, the more that empty space seemed to stretch and make that small body even smaller, even younger. He wished that she didn't have to be naked. Ducky was brisk as he indicated the damage from the rape, though, excising all his usual anecdotes from the proceedings, and when it was done he pulled a clean sheet to her neck. What remained looked like a doll's head, small and pretty and breakable with fine black hair spread out in a fan. Ducky took off his gloves and touched her hair briefly, moving a flyaway strand back into place. Gibbs waited.

"He might have been rushed," Ducky said. He twisted a finger of one of the gloves into a taut spiral and then let it uncurl. "I sent a sample of her blood to Abby, but from this bruising and the defensive marks on her hands, I imagine you'll find that she wasn't drugged."

"Could be that he just chose not to, Duck." He recounted Bayer's appearance on the news. "It could be that our killer wanted to make a point."

"Perhaps, but the evolution of his _modus operandi_ suggests a certain need for expediency." He rolled the sheet down beneath Marie Bayer's collarbone and indicated the heavy bruising in the center of her neck. "The first girl was also strangled, but the bruising on her throat was much more erratic. I thought at first that it might be from inexperience, but this time he put pressure perfectly on the windpipe for the shortest time of death. It would be improbable to go from amateurism to expertise in such a short time, especially when young Alex Kelly met her end in quite a different manner."

It was like watching the leaves change again; Alex Kelly's murder was the gazebo that stood between green leaves and new autumn. The seasonal shift.

"Something happened," he said. "Unless we have three murderers, something changed."

"Not three murderers," Ducky said. He held up a closed sample jar with a cotton swab inside. "I believe, when I send this to Abby, she'll confirm that it has the same lotion I found on the other bodies. And that was never publicized."

Gibbs looked down at the choker of bruises. "He changed. And it isn't just normal evolution."

"Yes, well, there's more that isn't quite normal. I estimate Miss Bayer's time of death to be approximately an hour before her body was discovered, so there _should_ have been residual fingerprints on her skin. There weren't any." He held up his hand. "Before you say it, of course he must have worn gloves. That would be the wise thing to do, in any case. But that _does _mean that we have lotion transfer without _DNA _transfer; the presence of skin lotion without the presence of actual skin."

"He puts his lotion on his gloves?"

"Apparently so," Ducky said. He put the sample jar down next to Marie's cupped hand. "We may have stumbled upon something ritualistic."

"Good," he said. "Always better to have a psychopath than a sociopath. They slip up more. All those lightning bugs bouncing around inside their heads." He flicked the fingers of his right hand against the palm of his left, picturing a jar full of buzzing fireflies, but it only made him think of the wasp-like hum of Tony's phone. His wriggling fingers curled up into a fist. Something would have to be done. If it kept up, it would kill Dinozzo's focus.

He put his hands in his pockets. "Anything else, Ducky? Fibers?"

Ducky shook his head. "Not so much as a thread, I'm afraid. Cotton fibers are so common that they were most likely incidental on the first body, and certainly not part of our killer's ritual. I'm sorry, Jethro."

He shrugged. "Wouldn't have helped much even if they'd been there."

"I did examine her stomach contents and found peppermint." He nudged another sample jar in Gibbs's direction. "I'll have Abby scan it for toxins or sedatives, of course, but as I said, I don't believe she was drugged. If this _is _from our killer and not simply a treat from her mother, it was most likely used as a lure. Interesting, because - -"

"The other girls didn't eat any candy," he said. Because he had never needed it before. The first two girls had been willing enough to suck on reds instead of peppermints, because they hadn't seen through whatever well-combed sheep's clothing their wolf had been wearing. The statistic Dinozzo had dragged forward to impress him had been true, and they both knew it: most abductions were the work of family members, of family friends, of friendly neighbors. But Marie Bayer had been revenge, bragging rights, not part of the scheduled plan. He hadn't had time to get to know her.

Ducky leaned against the table. "I'm afraid that's all I have for you."

"Better than anything we had before," he said. "We just need to find the common point between Kelly and Lacher - - which probably means we're looking at the Navy." He had spent too long dodging that connection, because he never wanted to admit that he could have ever protected anyone that could have ever done something like this, but now it seemed inevitable. Things had gone too far too quickly for him to waste time pretending that it hadn't even occurred to him.

"Then you're sure? That they knew their killer?"

"Reason enough to think so. Should make our job a little easier."

"Yes, I imagine it will." Ducky switched off the light above Marie Bayer, finally allowing Gibbs to look away. "And is _he _making your job any easier? Detective Dinozzo? I suppose a predilection for chronic insomnia is certainly a mark in his favor, although you _could _let him catch a little bit of shuteye, however indispensable he might be."

He sighed. "Hard to sleep when your phone won't stop ringing, Ducky."

"I only called him the once, and that was because you didn't answer - - "

"Not you. A few of Bayer's buddies are getting a kick out of calling every five minutes, saying that he might as well have done this all himself."

"Perhaps he should be the one forgetting to charge his phone," Ducky said. He pressed his hands against the empty space on the dark autopsy table; Gibbs didn't need to see his face to know that his faint smile had already subsided into a scowl. "But perhaps that won't be necessary. They might be persuaded to find another target for their spite."

"That a suggestion, Duck?"

"It could take a while for Abby to process the materials I'm sending her," Ducky said, so carefully neutral that another man might have thought he had actually changed the subject. Gibbs was not so misguided. "Should you find yourself with time on your hands on your way to the nearest coffee-shop. Unless, of course, you believe that it isn't your place." He looked steadily at Gibbs. "Though I believe you've already decided on that."

"Made it my place when I offered him a job."

Ducky smiled. "What lengthy and unconventional interviews you conduct, Gibbs. I presume that he said yes?"

He thought about explaining how close Tony had come to hysterics in his response, but that was something best kept between the two of them. He doubted that even Tony would remember all that he had said once he was himself again. He gave Ducky the answer that was the closest to the truth: "He didn't hear me. Doesn't matter. He'll say yes."

And he was sure of that - - it was the only thing in this damned mess of an investigation that he _was_ sure of. Because even if Dinozzo had never met him, even if they had not been pushed and tied together by the three dead girls, he would never have stayed in Baltimore for very much longer. They would have used him up eventually. Maybe just Bayer, or maybe the department, or maybe even the whole city - - they would have taken until there was nothing left. And Dinozzo would have disappeared, one way or another.

Gibbs planned on taking advantage of an opportunity; planned on getting him out alive and salvaging what was left. Dinozzo had talent, which was good, and potential, which was best. He'd been wasted. Gibbs wouldn't repeat that mistake.

And it would be best to start correcting a few old mistakes now.

He stacked the sample jars and gathered them up to his chest. "I can run these up to Abby for you, if you want."

"I have dearly missed having an assistant. If you don't mind?"

If he listened hard enough, he thought that he could still hear that phone ringing.

"Let's just say it's on my way."

- - - - - - - -

"I just want to know one thing. Just one. Do you see her when you close your eyes?"

Tony turned his face sideways into the headboard and breathed in the smells of waxed mahogany and dust. "Jenkins. Nice to hear from you again. I'd ask when you plan on returning my Spielberg box set, but I think we're past that, don't you? It's fine. No harm, no foul. You had time to watch them yet? Personally, I think _Schindler's List_ is his best work, but to each his own. You seem like an _E.T. _kind of guy."

There was silence on the other end of the line. Then, "Tony. I - -"

"I don't have to close my eyes," Tony said. "I can see her all the time."

He hung up.

The phone flashed again almost immediately; he snatched it up and was ready to throw it against the wall before he saw that the caller ID was different. His fingers weakened. Pete. He flipped his cell open and said, "You've got Tony, but do you know what to do with him?"

"Unfortunately, thanks to a very disturbing PowerPoint presentation Theresa put together and mass-emailed to everyone, I actually do. They have yet to invent the kind of bleach that could remove slide thirty-one from my head. But I think you might be more interested in another illicit use of technology that I have to offer. Are you in the mood for drug dealers?"

"Always. Oh, and if you still have a copy of that PowerPoint - -"

"Deleted it, recycled it, and reformatted my hard drive. Do you want the Deacon files?"

He sighed; a puff of dust blew up off the headboard. He watched the motes drift towards the window. "I really, really do. You might be better off trying to flag down Gibbs, though - - send one of your minions to autopsy and hand over whatever crate of floppy disks you have."

"Tony, every once in a while, you have to make that mental leap to the place where your common sense lives. I'm the one that keeps telling you that you shouldn't come into the lab, so why the hell would I call you and say that you should come into the lab?"

"Because it's funny?"

"Hilarious," Pete said dryly. "Open your door. I'm getting carpal tunnels from carrying this laptop around."

Tony felt one corner of his mouth draw upwards, almost against his will; he stroked the phone with his thumb before closing it. He walked barefoot to the door, pausing near the TV to kick a cluster of outdated sexual assault files underneath the bed. He opened the door for Pete, who pushed a laptop against Tony's chest and then cracked his knuckles and massaged his wrist, scowling first at his hand and then at Tony.

"I had Max load everything onto one of our spares," he said, lifting his lame hand and thrusting it forward to point at the laptop. "According to Abby, it's a complete virtual replica of Aaron Deacon's primary system, down to the last kilobyte; a total system wipe with a restore that replicated . . . you know what, I don't even know what half of it meant."

"You're an embarrassment to geeks everywhere."

"I own the special edition of _Wrath of Khan_ just like everyone else at the Star Trek convention. Did you eat all the Kit-Kats in your mini-bar yet?"

"Not _my_ mini-bar."

"I can smell the Skittles on your breath." He waved a hand. "You know what, never mind. I'm having a good night. Enjoy your duplicated motherboard thingy."

He turned to leave, but Tony caught him by the shoulder. "You came all the way here just to give me a laptop and try to break off a piece of my Kit-Kat bar?"

Pete smirked. "Of course not. I came all the way here because Abby is on break and I still have the honey-dust you gave me last Christmas." He took a moment to examine his hair in the mirror and then patted Tony on the arm. "If you need me, I'll be down the hall."

Tony looked at the door for a moment before shaking his head. He went back to the bed, balanced the laptop on his thighs, and flung it open to reveal a tropical fish desktop with a few neatly-organized folders carefully arranged to not cover any clownfish. He selected the one labeled INSURANCE and instantly revealed an extensive collection of documents, each marked with an unformatted date. No help. Not if he wanted to be expedient, anyway. He clicked on a random document and opened it: got a long list of names and numbers in columns.

Name. Purchase amount. Cost. Drug.

"The arrogance of this is going to make me cry," he said.

He scanned down; switched lists. Scanned down; switched lists. There were no recognizable names. He ran a global search on Max Prestor and turned up no results.

"No one ever wants to make my life any easier."

Whoever had used Prestor as their red herring obviously hadn't talked him into purchasing the reds, too. It would have been neater for Tony if they had, but he polished his silver lining, instead: with records as thorough as Deacon's, the real killer had to be sandwiched somewhere in these columns. He started feeding the acquaintance data into the global system, occasionally turning up an insignificant hit - - Maria Kelly had a college roommate who had purchased ecstasy on two occasions and one of Bryan Lacher's bowling buddies dabbled in coke - - Deacon didn't normally extend his drug empire as far as Bolivia, but Tony had discovered a few dozen instances of cocaine and even some spotty heroin interest. Mostly, though, he turned up party drugs: liquid X, black beauties, LSD, angel dust, and reds.

Tony had once watched one of his fraternity brothers try to claw through his own skin during a bad trip; he had no more patience for guys like Deacon than he had for the hard dealers.

Petty Officer Kelly had two drug connections.

Lieutenant Commander Lacher had nine.

"That's not right," he said.

He blinked at the little red checkmarks he had placed next to every scrawled name. Baltimore had a thriving underworld, but Tony had never known a respectable Naval officer to be so willing to get his hands dirty. Lacher couldn't have risen so high in the ranks by being inattentive to what surrounded him - - Tony could buy one or two sleazy friends slipping in under the radar, but not nine. And four of the nine were heavy users - - or at least heavy purchasers - - even if none of them had been interested in Seconal.

The tendons in his hands felt suddenly stiff. He mimicked Pete and wrung them together, kneading the palm of one hand with the palm of the other.

He position his fingers over the keyboard and, laboriously, typed it in: BRYAN LACHER.

He did not want to see this happen.

Three documents.

Lacher had bought ecstasy six months ago and four months ago, but Tony barely registered those first two files before he opened the third - - the one dated just two weeks ago. He rushed down the list of names until they blurred into a continuous bar of text - - then had to backtrack and go more slowly, forcing himself to read every name. His adrenaline had spiked and he could hear his breath whistling in and out through his nose.

"Seconal," he said. His voice skipped between registers.

As he stared at the screen, his phone rang for the first time in an hour. Everyone in dispatch must have taken an early lunch, he thought bitterly. If only it could have lasted longer. He squashed the phone between his ear and his shoulder and said, "Can we skip the part where you remind me that everything I touch dies and get to the part where I honest-to-God need you to, I don't know, do your_ job_?"

"_Jurassic Park_," Jenkins said quietly. "My favorite Spielberg movie. Tony, I'm sorry."

"We're all sorry." He knew that he could have done better, knew that he should have played the game and told Jenkins what he wanted to hear, but he no longer wanted to. Jenkins was better than the rest of them, but that didn't mean that he was good. Or forgiven. "Please don't tell me that you only called because Jiminy Cricket told you to."

"They brought in Prestor ten minutes ago. Agent Gibbs already moved him to interrogation."

He swung his arm out and smashed his fist against the headboard, hissed at the way his whole arm shook when he made contact. "Ten _minutes_? Were you even going to call me?"

"Gibbs was already in the building," Jenkins said. "No one thought that you needed to know."

"Well, for the record, I prefer the yelling to the silent treatment."

The screen of his laptop darkened and he grazed his fingertips over the keypad: the evidence brightened. He tried to swallow back the nausea that curdled in his stomach as he looked at it again. He would have to send the information through dispatch, as much as he didn't want to and as much as he doubted that they would actually pass it on to Gibbs. If Gibbs had just kept his cell phone charged, this never would've - - but he swallowed that down, too, because it was pointless. Gibbs hadn't done anything to him. He'd done this all to himself.

"I need you to take a message to interrogation," he said, drumming his fingers against the back of the phone. "Wait for him outside; no one likes to be interrupted. But I have something that he needs to know."

Jenkins hesitated. "You could come in. Come in and tell him yourself."

An ugly noise came from his throat at that; he wiped a hand across his mouth. "You know, I know what they say, but I'm not actually that stupid. Did you guys only knock off the phone calls because you thought you'd get to beat the crap out of me in person? I'm sorry if the disappointment hurts."

"We won't bother you," Jenkins said, softly, insistently. "Really."

Tony gripped the phone so tightly that he heard the casing crack. "I don't believe you. I don't believe you and I don't trust you. Don't try to tell me that I should."

"I called you. I told you. No one else would have."

"You did call," Tony said. "You also called to ask if I saw Marie when I closed my eyes. Out of curiosity, and please keep in mind that there _are _no right or wrong answers, which call do you think is going to stay with me longer?"

He waited. Jenkins said nothing. That was good: if he had apologized again, Tony didn't know what he would have done.

"Now. I need you to wait for Special Agent Gibbs outside interrogation, and when he comes out, I need you to tell him that Lieutenant Commander Lacher purchased Seconal a week ago from Aaron Deacon. Easy message. No word more than three syllables long. Can you get it to him? Or should I call someone else?"

"You sound like him," Jenkins said. "Do you know that?"

Tony hadn't known; didn't understand how Jenkins knew, either. He said, "Will you do it?"

"I'll do it." Papers shuffled in the background; Tony could hear a radio that was picking up only static. "Tony. I swear I never thought - -"

Tony hung up. He didn't care.

Ellie Lacher had been wearing a yellow sundress and her hair had still been tightly kinked into pigtails; it had been a Sunday, and she had still been carrying her little dyed wicker purse from church. There had been grass stains on her sandals. Tony had thought then that Lacher must have been a good guy; must have been a single father so devoted to spoiling his little girl that he had let her go to her afternoon playgroup still wearing her Sunday school dress. Maybe she had wanted to feel like a princess. Pretty Ellie Lacher. Daddy's little girl.

Had she followed him away from her playgroup? Had he toyed with her pigtails, said that she looked pretty? Given her the Seconal like candy, like a special treat?

He had no proof; with the way he had obtained the records, he didn't even have any evidence. Nothing from these files could ever darken the door of a courtroom. It was only enough to make him wonder; to make him recall his sketches and his photographs in vivid detail and to then animate them. And with nothing else to do, with no way of contacting Gibbs himself, all he could do was watch his new film unreel in his head. What he had told Jenkins was true. He didn't have to close his eyes.

Had he told her that he loved her?

Tony pushed the laptop away from him and made it to the bathroom in three long steps. He knelt down in front of the toilet and gagged, squeezing his eyes shut and trying not to think, trying not to imagine, trying to forget what he had seen. The way he could forget his sketches, sometimes, if he drew them all at once, from his eyes to his hand to his paper, not thinking about it - - but no. Nothing worked. He stumbled to his feet and went to the sink; splashed water on his face and let it drip back down slowly, inch by inch. Some of the shapes he had drawn were still ghosts on the mirror; he touched the heart one delicately, breaking it.

Her father.

The water crawled back down his face.

Her father, and he had no proof. And no time to wait for Gibbs.

"Just have to find something myself, then," he said. He wiped the mirror clean and did not look at his reflection. "I think I still remember how to get to Deacon's house."


	13. Chapter XIII

**Chapter XIII**

Aaron Deacon was four inches shorter than Tony and it clearly frustrated him; he kept drawing himself up to the balls of his feet to make eye contact. Under normal circumstances, Tony would have drawn himself up to his full height just to be contrary, but he needed a favor, so instead he rounded his shoulders, slumped, and lost two inches. Disguise without decoration. Why use props when he was this good without them?

"I recognize your name," Deacon said. He kept his hands at his sides when he talked; Tony knew that a twitch of a finger would invite one of the bodyguards into the fray. "Detective Anthony Dinozzo, Baltimore Homicide. I've seen you on television."

"What can I say? BPD likes to use the prettiest face in the room. You ought to see what I did for our Nielsen ratings." He smiled—not his best smile or his real smile, but one with all his teeth, designed to catch attention as quickly and effectively as a bite. "If you watch so much television, you must have heard about all those little girls. Such a tragedy."

Deacon said, "It keeps me awake at night." It was not a direct interrogation and so he had relaxed; he began to clean his nails with a letter opener.

Tony heard his teeth click together. He thought about what he might do if the letter opener were in his hands, instead. "There are details that you wouldn't have heard on television. No such thing as full disclosure during a homicide investigation."

The letter opener moved back and forth like a metronome. "I didn't kill those girls."

"If I thought that you had, I'd be here to ask your Hello Kitty girls for your alibi," Tony said pleasantly. "You like them younger and I could probably turn up a call girl or three with your number, but these girls weren't your type. Nothing too illegal in your bedroom. I want to talk about the rest of the house. Specifically, the garage."

"No warrant," Deacon observed.

"No need for one. I'm not here to arrest you."

"Does anyone ever believe you when you say that?"

"Of course they believe me," Tony said. "They've seen me on television."

Deacon smiled. He placed the letter opener back on the desk and began to examine his cuticles. "We can talk about the rest of the house if you want, detective. Talking is easy. Looking is going to cost you a little bit more."

"No looking." He slid the photograph from his pocket and unfolded it: Lieutenant Commander Lacher, in a freshly-pressed uniform, holding his daughter by the hand. He had trouble looking at it for too long and flipped it quickly to face Deacon, instead. "Is he one of your customers? Name's Bryan Lacher."

"I don't have any customers," Deacon said. "Independently wealthy. You don't do your homework, Detective Dinozzo. No wonder they relegate you to PR."

"I'm a screw-up through and through," Tony agreed. He had no experience in this role—he had never stayed in one place long enough to get his hands dirty. He knew that Deacon had connections with the department, knew that he probably greased the wheels of a few harmless busts to protect his own empire—but he did not know what Deacon expected of him, or how he had made these deals before. He did not speak this language. He settled for charm, because everyone always believed him when he smiled. "You should see my record by now. They used up an entire ink cartridge on my disciplinary sheet. Which is why no one would use my testimony to try to bring you down. Just a waste of their time. What would a homicide detective want with a suspected drug lord, anyway?"

"Information," Deacon said. He pursed his lips. "But all information comes from somewhere."

"Sources have a way of disappearing under the wrong circumstances. I'm working out of a hotel room, things can get pretty disorganized."

Deacon shook his head. "Nothing is ever that simple, detective." He took the photograph, though, and Tony closed his hand quickly so that he would not reach out for it again. Deacon held it in front of him at an angle so the light from the Tiffany desk lamp shone red and gold and the glossy surface. "Navy. I've always had a military market. It's best when there's a war, too. Everyone wants something to make the pain go away."

"How much pain did Lacher have?"

"I wouldn't know," Deacon said. He passed the photograph back. "I don't recognize him."

"Of course you don't."

"It's a poor businessman who refuses to delegate, detective. Why have business if it leaves no time for pleasure?"

"Never understood that myself." He did not smile now. He could not make his mouth relax. "Could I meet your employees?"

"Your talking is getting perilously close to looking. We agreed that this was only a conversation. You should never break your own rules."

Deacon raised a hand and twitched two of his fingers as if he were tapping out a rhythm; Tony had known that it would happen sooner or later. He did not move. Movement was a threat. When he felt the bodyguard's hand on the back of his neck, he let himself be forced down. Someone began using a nine mil to part his hair. He did not look up.

Deacon continued to talk as if nothing had changed. He took out a handkerchief and began to polish a highball glass. "You don't have a head for business, detective. You haven't offered me any incentives. We both know that any information I give to you compromises my business—even if you never use the information against me, the release of it injures my reputation. I have an extensive clientele. No one wants their name to ever be said in connection with mine. You see, they don't want to be compromised either. All deals done in the dark."

"You keep their names," Tony said. The steel of the muzzle was cold; the gun had not been fired recently. He couldn't decide if that were better or worse than the alternative. "You have security measures for situations like this. No point in saving the information if you never intend to use it. So how much does it cost?"

He was not confident; he was just cold. He knew that he was not too young to die, if only because he had seen men and women much, much younger than him die for actions much, much less foolish than this. But Deacon was right, he did not have a head for business. He had a better understanding for the concept of the gamble—time and training had taught him how to put it all on the line and let it ride. Tony had the best poker face of anyone he'd ever known. The house hadn't won yet.

Deacon's fingers squeaked on the glass. "How did you get that information?"

Tony shrugged. The gun barrel smashed into his cheekbone.

"It's not a hard question," Deacon said. "And we were getting along so well."

"Absolutely," Tony said. "We should go to an Orioles game."

He expected to be hit again, but the nine mil had already repositioned itself at the base of his skull and Deacon offered no signal to the gunman. He looked thoughtful. He had stopped polishing the glass and instead just stood there with it balanced in the palm of his hand. Tony could not stop his head from swaying back and to the side—the gun traced his movements but did not hinder them. He watched the lamplight glint off the heavy crystal of the highball glass and began to count his breaths. Focused through the haze of pain. He wondered what Deacon was thinking.

"Whatever you have—"

"Was obtained illegally," Tony said. His words sounded mushy. "I've got nothing on you."

"And you want something on him. Bryan Lacher." He smacked his lips slightly on the last syllable of the name, as if he could taste it.

"Just an answer." He licked his lips and tasted blood. "Possibly some antiseptic. But you want an incentive. I don't suppose I can appeal to your conscience."

Deacon scoffed. "What's it to me? I don't have a daughter."

Tony leaned back until he was sitting on his heels. He had braided Marie's hair once—it had taken him nearly half an hour because it was cold, his fingers were clumsy, and he lacked practice. Five in the morning on the last day of the custody trial, Lucas mainlining coffee and changing his tie every ten minutes, and Marie yawning and getting toast crumbs on her jacket. Tony had tied the braids off with snippets of plaid Christmas ribbon. She was young and tired and sad, and her eyes were pink from crying, and Tony had never, in his life, loved anyone so much. Now he looked back at Deacon and he said it even though talking hurt like hell:

"Neither do I."

Tony was all wrong for his job, Lucas had told him so—Tony was wrong because he still thought that if he tried hard enough, if he meant well enough, if he talked fast enough, he could convince people to be human.

"You're beginning to bore me, detective." Deacon did not care. Deacon did not have a daughter and he could not see how anyone else ever could. "Why do you need confirmation? You already know the answer. You already have your lead. What else do you need?"

They never trusted him to know what he was doing. "Legitimacy. Proof."

"Proof that you'll make disappear later. Proof that will never see court."

"Proof from an anonymous informant," he said. He was reaching now. "A protected, anonymous informant. Like a tip hotline. Enough to get inside a door that's already cracked open. And then it goes away. Hard evidence overrules testimony. You'll never see the inside of a courtroom on this one. I'll never need to talk to you again. _If_ you help me."

"If," Deacon said.

When he smiled, it felt like the entire right side of his face was on fire. He smiled anyway. He saw his reflection in the highball glass and knew how he looked—bruised and bloody, face ashen from exhaustion, and a perfect PR smile. "If you don't help me, it'll happen again. Someone else's daughter. And the first thing I'll have them do is a blood test. Whatever she has in her system, I'll connect it to you. I don't care if the drugs in her blood are Vitamin C and baby aspirin, I'll find a way to drag your business out into the open. And I won't care about legitimacy then. Those records I have, all those names? You'll see me on television again. I'll tell the whole city just how many people in the mayor's office come to you right before their parties. I'll get the green cards pulled for your entire staff. And by the time I'm done, by the time the drug dogs have prowled through your house sticking their noses in every single corner, a dozen college kids will be running your business and it'll be _my_ pleasure."

He was outnumbered. He was bleeding. There was a gun at the back of his head. And Aaron Deacon's hands had started to shake.

Why use props when he was this good without them?

"Bryan Lacher. Occasional customer, mostly recreational."

"Two weeks ago," Tony said, as if he were talking to a child. "I want to know what he did two weeks ago. I'm sure you remember."

"Seconal," Deacon said. "He bought Seconal. Nanako talked to him for a few minutes—she likes that he's fluent in Japanese—you can confirm with her. He said he had trouble sleeping and wanted something with a little more bang for his buck. I never like a man that needs to justify his habit."

'You didn't delegate his habit, though."

"Lieutenant commanders are high profile; I meet them and their names go in the system. I delegate the high school kids that want GHB for prom night."

"The responsible businessman," Tony said. "Looking out for the best interests of his community. I'm going to stand up now." He felt the pressure at the back of his skull ease and he staggered to his feet, using every inch of his height now to make the right impression. "An anonymous source tipped me off. You, I've never heard of."

"And everyone lives happily ever after." Deacon poured three fingers of Scotch into the glass and leaned back on this desk; lifted a toast in Tony's direction. "If I see you again, even from a distance, I'll stand back and watch your brains hit the sidewalk." He bobbed the glass. "To working relationships, Detective Dinozzo. Cheers."

Tony touched his cheek. His fingers came away wet. "Six months ago, Vice designed an undercover op to tear you down."

"I'm still here," Deacon said. He drank his Scotch.

"Because they didn't use me," Tony said. "You're still here because they didn't use me." He didn't know why he wanted to make that point—maybe it had been the joke about the high school prom, maybe it was still just the memory of the Christmas ribbons in Marie's hair—but he stood there with his face stinging and he said, "Nothing lasts forever. You only exist because this is the first time you've talked to me. It could have been different."

Deacon said, "I would have recognized you. From the news," but he didn't sound so sure.

"You wouldn't have."

"Why?"

"No one ever does."

He did not look behind him. He knew the bodyguards were balancing their hands on the butts of their nine mils. He walked out.

- - - - -

The second ex-wife, the one who always complained that he never opened up to her, had left him for a tax lawyer, who also did not open up to her but who had considerably more money. The marriage had left Gibbs with two tattered blue satin throw pillows, a closet door that did not close properly, and an amplified hatred of lawyers. Ducky had made several attempts to explain to him that tax lawyers and criminal lawyers were not quite the same breed of shark, but Gibbs at least considered them to be swimming in the same ocean and eating the same tourists. Max Prestor's older brother was no exception.

Twenty minutes of silence in interrogation, and Aaron Prestor had never broken a sweat. After ten minutes, he had arched his hands together into a steeple and leaned back in his chair. After fifteen, he had started humming in the back of his throat. He had done this before. Gibbs wondered if he had done it for his brother before, too, and if the circumstances changed anything at all. Probably not.

The silence was bothering Max, though—he had started to fidget. The bright orange one-pieces had no pockets, so he had flattened his hands against his thighs, then bunched up the fabric in his fingers, then caught his fists between his knees. His face looked grayish between the freckles. Of the two of them, of the professional and the peeping tom, Max might have been the one that could be persuaded to cooperate, to value delicate bodies and little hands and shortened lives more than his own arrogance. They had scared him once, when they had surprised him at his house with questions, and Dinozzo must have scared him again when he had given chase outside the Bayer house. Scared was good. Gibbs liked scared.

Gibbs chose Max. He made eye contact. "I know you didn't kill them."

Aaron Prestor adjusted the gold-capped pen in his pocket. "Don't talk to him." He said it casually but automatically. He had a faint Harvard accent that added slight burrs to his consonants. The tax lawyer had had the same voice.

"I didn't kill them, though," Max said. He turned his head to the side, talking to his brother now instead of to Gibbs. That was all right. "Aaron, I didn't kill those girls."

"Of course you didn't," Aaron said. He had not forgotten the focus of the interrogation, though—he had never turned to meet his brother's eyes. "As you said, as he said. I'm open to discussing the charge of trespassing on Emily Bayer's property and even the arrest evasion, but I fail to see why I should discuss it with NCIS or, for that matter, Baltimore homicide."

"Detective Dinozzo was the one who attempted to arrest your brother. A Baltimore homicide detective working in conjunction with NCIS. We can start there, if you like."

"That's acceptable."

Gibbs said to Max, "Why did you run?"

It was like bad ventriloquism. Max's lips moved, but before any sound could come out, Aaron had already stolen the conversation.

"My brother's fixations are harmless, but they do exist," Aaron said smoothly. "He's already sought treatment. Ms. Bayer is a very attractive woman."

"Grieving for her murdered child."

"Fixations are irrational. My brother is ill."

Gibbs pressed his thumbs against the edge of the table until he could feel the pressure on the backs of his fingernails. He did not flinch. He had known men and women smart enough and good enough to see and understand both sides of any story. They could have empathy for the criminals and sympathy for the victims and feel everything like that without breaking. Most people were not so good, or so willing to be tainted by comprehending contradictions. Most people had to pick a side. Gibbs was not the best, not the smartest: he had chosen sympathy, chosen the victims. It was easier that way. He thought that Dinozzo might have made the same choice, although Dinozzo—who had forgiven Bayer so readily for so much—was probably closer to understanding the bigger picture. To seeing everything. Gibbs admired people who could do that, but he had no patience for people like Aaron Prestor. Prestor saw the other side and refused to acknowledge that there was anything else. His brother was sick. Everything was excused. The little girls were not dead. Marie Bayer and Alex Kelly and Ellie Lacher would come home at any moment, because no one was to blame.

"The letter," Max said. "Tell him about the letter."

Aaron smiled. His lips were tight against his teeth. "Max."

Gibbs relaxed his hold on the table. "There's a letter. Your brother seems to think that you should tell me about it. Want to give it a shot?"

Aaron drummed his pen on the table. He had not lost his polished veneer, but his cool had faded somewhat—he wouldn't be able to stand another twenty minutes of silence. His brother was tugging apart all of the loose ends that he had so neatly tied together. "He received an anonymous letter a few weeks ago asking him for candid shots of Lieutenant Commander Lacher, Eleanor Lacher, Robert Kelly, Marcia Kelly, and Alexandria Kelly. He researched them, followed them, and took the photographs."

"He didn't know them."

"I'd never met them before," Max said. He looked at his reflection in the tabletop. "I said I didn't kill them."

"Yeah, heard you the first time." He looked at Aaron Prestor and rolled his eyes, as if they both understood that all of it was just a joke. "I'll need that letter."

"We're willing to cooperate."

"Yeah, I noticed that from how the two of you came forward early on and all by yourselves."

He had left Prestor, the first time—standing there on the porch with the sun baking down on his neck, he had let Prestor go because it had been so early and so improbable. Because his instincts had been right—Prestor hadn't killed anyone—but wrong all the same. Two girls could have lived, maybe. Something could have been done.

"We're working to rectify the situation," Aaron said.

There was nothing Gibbs could say to that. "Did the letter mention Marie Bayer or her parents? Was there a deal involved with them, too?"

"No. He's not connected to that. The letter offered two thousand dollars as an advance and promised the rest once he was contacted again."

He looked at Max, now. "You were never contacted again?"

"No," Max said. He smiled. His front teeth were slightly crooked. "Ten thousand down the drain. But Emily Bayer was pretty."

"Why did you follow her? Why did you take her picture, if you weren't being paid?"

"I saw her on the news," Max said. He took his glasses off and polished them on his shirttail. Without the thick lenses, his eyes looked small and watery. "Her daughter died, too. Someone else must have taken her picture."

"But not you."

"No." He put the glasses on again. "I don't like little girls. But I saw Emily Bayer and . . ." He shrugged. "She was very pretty. Delicate. She never would have noticed me. Things could have lasted a long, long time."


	14. Chapter XIV

NOTE: Another lengthy delay, for which I apologize—the holidays intervened, followed by a great deal of real life stress, and also, the second half of this chapter proved very difficult to write—you can effectively sum up this chapter by noting that both Tony and Gibbs have serious, serious issues. I also thought about bracketing this chapter with another one, as an apology, but that would only result in a longer delay as I _wrote_ the next chapter—so the next part should be up within a week.

- - - - -

**Chapter XIV**

Gibbs _heard_ the bruises before he saw them. He stood in front of the double-mirror in the viewing room attached to interrogation, his hands braced against the frame, and the door behind him clicked open and shut. Then Tony—and he had known that it would have to be Tony, because anyone else that would have had the balls to come in wouldn't have had the good sense to come in quietly—said, "I have something," and it was in his voice. His enunciation had changed. Slightly slurred on the sibilant and all the letters too precise in pathetic overcompensation. Gibbs knew the sound and knew what it implied. He moved his hands together on the frame, a quick and crucial gesture, like an embrace or an attack—he wasn't sure which—and hated Lucas Bayer. He turned around.

He had expected a busted lip. This was different—this was _spectacular_. The bruise started at the back of Dinozzo's jaw and stretched down to his mouth; there was a fresh scab in the very corner—as he watched, Tony touched it with the tip of his tongue—and his lower lip was puffy. Bayer hadn't used his fists this time. No one's hand left that kind of mark.

"He pistol-whipped you." The viewing room was too small for this kind of realization: he could hear his anger reverberating in the walls.

Tony shook his head and the bruise slid back and forth from the shadows. "It isn't what you think." The syllables were still a little mushy, but he only sounded tired, not defensive, and, because of that, Gibbs was willing to listen—so far Dinozzo hadn't been anything he'd thought, after all. Maybe this was just more of the same.

"What is it, then?"

"I went to see Aaron Deacon. Pissed off his bodyguards." _Pissed_ didn't come out right, it was more of a hiss that ended with Tony's tongue flicking against the scab in the corner of his mouth again. "But I got what I needed."

Gibbs noticed the shift there, but he wasn't sure if Dinozzo did—from _we_ to _I_. He had moved back into the singular. He had done something on his own and so he'd forgotten that there was anything at all to be done together. Gibbs understood the strange resume now, the alphabet soup career arrangements and the jumps and skips across the country. Dinozzo had gotten too used to being alone, too uncomfortable with anything plural. So when Tony tilted his head back and smiled, showed off that gun-barrel bruise, Gibbs moved the rest of the way forward and put his hand against Tony's chin.

"I want Ducky to look you over," he said. His singular to match Dinozzo's. _I want_. "And then we'll talk about what you got from Deacon." He brought them back again. Tony did not move. Was it really going to take more? He supposed it was a fair enough trade. He needed Tony and Tony needed to know, and once they covered all of that, they could find what _they_ needed, which was going to be the same thing. He looked back through the glass once, saw Max Prestor looking at him with bright eyes, and said, "Don't do anything like this again. I don't want to spend half of our cases putting you back together. Bayer was bad enough."

Tony turned his head to the side and Gibbs let him slip out of his reach. His fingers were cold.

"Later," Tony said. He was looking over Gibbs's shoulder and Gibbs wondered if he were seeing Prestor or his own reflection. "Ask me later."

"Wasn't asking." It was a test, not a response.

Tony still didn't look at him. "You'll ask if you want me to say yes."

And he would, too. He didn't doubt it. He nodded. "Later, then. You get anything from Deacon besides that bruise?"

Tony finally met his eyes. He looked almost painfully grateful for an instant, but then it was swept into the corners and beneath the mask, and all Gibbs could see was the fierce, unhealthy, hardhearted joy. _All of you people are the same_, Pete Woley had said, but Gibbs knew cops—knew Baltimore PD by now—and knew that this kind of devotion, this kind of obsession, was rare.

"Lacher," he said. "Lacher bought Seconal two weeks ago." He almost smiled, but the one corner of his mouth wouldn't move properly, so it was more of a grimace. "An anonymous witness, tip hotline kind of thing."

He kept talking; he said something about the utter lack of legitimate channels involved in this investigation, but Gibbs was past hearing him. His mind had frozen, locked tight around Bryan Lacher's name, and he couldn't relax enough to accommodate anything else Tony had to offer.

"His daughter," he said. He couldn't swallow the words, had to spit them out, throw them against the clean and sensible iron-gray walls of the viewing room, had to use them to break the two-way mirror that stood between him and Prestor. The edges of his world were black. He felt Tony's hands on him, on his wrist and on his shoulder, steering him down and away. The solid surface of the chair rose up underneath him and Tony tugged and twisted him into the light again, into the sweetly sensible connections between cause and effect, into a world with a possibility—however scarce—for good. He could see Tony somewhere out there, then too close to him, white-faced and concerned.

"It's all right," Tony said. "Just sit down. No one likes this. No one ever wants this."

Not pity, not sympathy. It was empathy, or at least _understanding_. And he knew that even if Tony ever wondered why, ever wanted an answer, he would never ask—no more than Gibbs would ever ask what Tony had said or done to earn that bruise, and why the bruise hadn't bothered him, why it had seemed acceptable. No questions. Not when anyone would have to raise their dead to answer them.

"Water? Or, you know, coffee?" That unintentionally terrible smile again. "Scotch?"

Gibbs blinked twice and watched the shadows retreat from his vision, watched the floor stop slowly rolling back and forth underneath them. "We don't drink until it's over," he said. "But I think then we can buy out the bar."

"I take women over whiskey," Tony said. He didn't sound like he was joking. Gibbs remembered their first phone call, when Tony—_years_ younger then, it seemed—had said that if it were a really good night, he wouldn't be in his own bed. Gibbs had known men to choose that way out before, and Tony was young enough to have an easy time of it. Whatever quieted his head for a night was a good thing. "We can still go to the same bar."

Gibbs rubbed the back of his neck, digging his thumbs in to ease the pressure building in the sleep-starved muscles. The thought of a bar, of company, of the end—it was too tempting. He shrugged it away. "You still have a picture of Lacher on you?"

"I'm a veritable one-hour photo," Tony said. He shuffled through several photographs in the inside pocket of his jacket and finally produced Lacher's picture. He folded the rest of them together again and replaced them—they fell back into position, pressed against each other and rustling close to his heart. "You're going to check with Prestor?"

Gibbs nodded. "He might not confirm—he said he was contacted by letter—but if he does, we'll have something more definite than your _anonymous tip_."

"I'll go in with you."

He moved forward but Gibbs pressed a hand against his shoulder and knocked him back a step. "No, you won't. You'll go down to autopsy and see Ducky about that bruise."

Tony put his hands behind his head, elbows spread out wide, fingers laced at the back of his skull. It was an effort not to do _something_, Gibbs was sure, but he didn't know what impulse Tony was trying to stop. "I'll have to pass by dispatch on my way to autopsy. Bad idea, boss. I mean, not that I'm afraid of continuing all those conversations in person, but they'd be the people most likely to get me in trouble right now. And I'm in trouble anyway."

"Don't worry about dispatch," Gibbs said. "They're not going to bother you."

He tried to keep his voice even, so that he could whittle the subtext down to nothing, but Tony responded—the hands came down to his sides, as if his strings had been cut, and he started to say something and then stopped. Then, slowly, "The phone calls stopped after you went in. And I talked to Jenkins, he said—he said that he knew you, a little. You talked to them."

It was the _surprise_ that cut into him. Had Tony thought he would let it continue indefinitely, let that damned phone ring and ring and ring for hours, for days? Until the casing split from Tony's desperate grip, until Tony grew hoarse from alternately holding back and letting go?

"You didn't need that," Gibbs said. He said it quietly, directly to Tony without the question of it being for anyone or anything else. No double purposes, no forced compliment, no lever to persuade Tony to move. "No one needs that. And you sure as hell didn't deserve it. You're working for me now. People should know better than to screw with you."

"Okay," Tony said. He lifted the good corner of his mouth in a crooked smile. That was as all right as they were going to get for now. "Thanks."

Gibbs thought about Tony leading him down into the chair without any questions, just accepting that there were some places where, even after all these years, Gibbs could still be hurt. Accepting those gulfs and crevasses in his strength and then building tenuous bridges across them, covering those weaknesses with the stronger parts of himself. They didn't have to thank each other for building those bridges; it was something that had to be done. Gibbs had taken a visceral pleasure in the construction of his own, anyway—the phone calls had made him angry, all that buzzing and all those flashing lights and the wearily resigned look on Tony's face as he took call after call… Tony didn't need to thank him for what he had wanted to do, for what he had enjoyed doing.

So he didn't reply to Tony, just raised his hand and gestured at the door. "Ducky. Now. He can catch you up on the autopsy reports while you're down there." And Ducky would be more able to give sympathy, to worry more openly over the bruise, to offer what Gibbs could not. After all, Ducky had been building bridges for Gibbs for years before Tony Dinozzo came around.

"I don't want to take too long," Tony said. He felt the corner of his mouth, where the busted lip was like a torn piece of leather. "No stitches. I don't have time for the emergency room."

"Stitches if you need them, and if you're in that much of a hurry, you can get them here." God only knew how many times Gibbs himself had been propped up on an autopsy table, ignoring the naked and dead bodies around him while Ducky did his patchwork.

Tony raised his eyebrows. "Stitches in autopsy?"

"Well, he sews up the Y-incisions, so you know he has the equipment."

Tony thought about it, and then gave a precise little shudder. "I—I honestly can't think about autopsy tools being that close to my mouth." He made it to the door before he turned around, hand still on his mouth to cover the worst of the damage and to push the swollen lip into being more cooperative, and said, "It still doesn't feel right, boss. You said that Lacher was _insane_ when you talked to him. I've never met anyone good enough to fake the zombie act."

Gibbs hadn't, either. In his experience, killers covered up their crimes with tears or anger, not the kind of shambling, disconnected despair that had rolled off Bryan Lacher in waves. But he couldn't afford to ignore this kind of evidence, not with three little girls dead already, not with the threat of more corpses strung across his vision. Not when the bastard they were hunting had already been clever enough to produce Max Prestor out of the woodwork to serve as his stalking horse. He would have to grab at what he could, for now. Maybe they would be lucky. Either way, he didn't intend to take any chances.

"When you're done with Ducky, head to the Kelly house. I want to know if they've ever even _heard_ of Lacher."

Tony drew back a little at that, at Gibbs skimming so easily over all of his concerns, but Gibbs was too tired to explain that it was just like before, when he had pushed Tony against the car and told him that what they wanted didn't matter. What mattered was that there was something that had to be done. He'd had to sit with Marcia Kelly and ask her if she'd screwed a man that had murdered her daughter, and he had to—they had to—do this, too. He couldn't remind Tony of that every time Tony forgot. He didn't have the patience.

"Kelly said that the name was familiar—"

"Then find out _why_ it's familiar, Dinozzo."

Tony kept one hand on the doorknob, one hand on his mouth. "And you'll be where, exactly?"

Code words, in their business, for _don't bring him in without me_.

"At Lacher's." He watched Tony's mouth tighten, half-covered by his hand, and saw his fingertips go white and bloodless as he pressed them down. "I'll keep him in his house until you're sure that they've at least met him. Shown him pictures of their daughter. Something. I won't arrest him, but I won't let him out of my sight. I'm not going to take a man in for killing his own daughter unless I'm damn sure he really did it."

- - - - -

Dr. Mallard's hands were cool. Tony thought that it might have been a transitive property kind of thing, from having had so many bloodless bodies against his fingers over the years, but he also thought that was kind of a disturbing thing to think, so he didn't say it out loud.

And anyway, it felt good. It was the first bit of touch he'd had in days without there being weight behind it: Emily had clung to him, Lucas had hurt him, and even Gibbs had _meant_ something—had only touched him to fix him or to move him into place. Dr. Mallard only meant to be kind. Tony had forgotten that there were people who did that kind of thing. It was sort of nice. Nice enough, at least, for him to not complain as Dr. Mallard maneuvered him up onto the autopsy table and tilted his head back until he stared up into the cold white overhead lamps.

He didn't want or need any lectures about being careful, so before anything could start, he pulled a tattered rabbit out of his hat. "Gibbs offered me a job. I think."

"Yes, he said something about that. Breathe through your nose, please, I need to get a better look at your jaw when it's in its natural position."

"Sorry." He clamped his mouth shut as Dr. Mallard's fingers grazed over the swelling, gritting his teeth a little whenever even that slight amount of pressure made the bruises ache. When Mallard took his fingers away, he said, "Do you think I should take it?"

"I certainly don't think you should stay here."

He twitched the good corner of his mouth. "That's not really an answer, Dr. Mallard."

"_Ducky_, please. You can step down, it doesn't look like they did any permanent damage, though I'd recommend not letting it happen again if you can help it." He gave Tony a hand down off the table and there it was again, that stupid, pointless contact that made the tight cramp of tension in Tony's chest ease. "If you can work with Jethro, then you'll be happier working with him than anyone else, no matter where you go. But that doesn't sound so believable, does it? You can see why I try to restrain myself from giving advice."

"It's not so unbelievable," he said. Not compared to everything else. Not compared to little Marie Bayer and the Christmas ribbons he'd once used to tie her hair. Thinking of it made something twist inside of him, and he remembered the only reason he'd agreed to come down: "Can I see her? Marie?"

Ducky hesitated. "I'm not sure Gibbs would want—"

"Gibbs isn't here," Tony said. "And it's not his business, it's mine. Show me."

Ducky gave him a quick, searching look, as if he were seeing someone else standing in Tony's place, and then shook his head. Washing his hands of Tony, no doubt. So much for kindness. But he walked to the third drawer in the wall and pulled open the door.

He slid the table out much more slowly than he had opened the drawer; giving Tony time to change his mind, maybe, if Tony had been the kind of person to back away from the doors he'd wanted open. But he wasn't—although he sometimes wished that he could be—and so he walked to the table and pulled back one corner of the sheet. Then, though, although he hadn't wanted to, had never meant to, had never thought he could—he stopped. Why do it? He had already seen her body, already believed in the unforgiving reality of her death. And if the image of her on the slide, wet with the blood that was bright red on the aluminum, hadn't crystallized in his mind, why should it?

"I used to play with her," he said, still holding the sheet in place, still not looking even though another inch of pull would show him her face. "She was sweet. I mean, most kids don't like me, I don't know what to do with them, it's like a slow-motion train-wreck, but she was—I loved her. I loved her so much."

It hurt, and he wanted to explain that: it hurt much worse than the bruise on his jaw, than his already-fading black eye, than Lucas's anger, than dispatch's blame. None of that hurt as badly as it had been meant to, because _this_ had already come and carved him open. What was a scratch when he'd already been scraped raw? What was the rest of it_ for_, anyway? Why did they think that they had to punish him? Like it _mattered_, like they could do _anything_ to him that would be worse than this, like he had never played with her or told her stories or kissed the tips of her pigtails or loved her at all. She was just _gone_ and they thought they could top that, they thought they could pile on, they thought they could bury him, but they could only bury her. They would have to bury her. He would have to wait here for that, at least, no matter how much Lucas would hate him by then. He would have to be there for that, at least—for Emily, and for that little girl that he'd loved.

He did not pull the sheet back. He could close the door.

He'd loved her, she was dead, and he wanted to remember that she'd been beautiful: that she'd smiled and laughed and done both of them, at least sometimes, because of him.

"I don't get it," he said. "I mean, I really don't."

He smoothed the sheet back down, tucked it beneath the covered curve of her head. He felt that he should do something more, that he should tell her good night, that he should pretend, but now he was too conscious of Ducky, and his parents had taught him not to make a spectacle of himself. So he just tucked her in again, as he had done before, but he couldn't slid her back into the still darkness of the drawer. That would have to wait until he was gone. She hadn't liked the dark and he wouldn't put her in it.

He put his hand on the table next to where he thought hers would be, her cupped little hand with the chipped pink nail polish on the fingers, and pushed himself back into the job. "Seconal? Was there Seconal? I didn't get a chance to ask Gibbs."

"No, I'm afraid not. She wasn't drugged."

She'd felt it, then. She'd felt everything. His teeth clicked together.

"_Nothing_?"

Ducky took pity on him. "There was peppermint in his stomach. If he used it to lure her away from the other children, it might have been laced with—"

That hit him. That was the first thing to hurt since he had taken the phone call that had told him she was dead; the first thing even to really touch him. He looked up, startled, and then jerked back, stumbling away from Ducky and even from the ghost on the table. His fingers were still bunched up in the sheet and so that came with him, tugged off the table, off the body, and onto the floor in a rush of white—and that, that hurt him too, because he hadn't wanted to see her, he'd wanted to change, but now he couldn't even do that.

He couldn't unlearn the bruises on her body, couldn't ever misremember he nakedness, couldn't forget the blue tint to her lips and the way the same blue on her fingertips clashed with her nail polish.

He spun away and turned into the wall, pushed his face against the chilled metal of the other drawers that held the other bodies, and breathed out until he made enough fog against the drawer that he could go at least a second without seeing anything but clouds. He knew that Marie would be there, though, in every dark place and in every broken body, for the rest of his life. The one thing he had wanted to do differently, the one decision he had wanted to change, and now he couldn't even do that. He'd erased the smiling girl who had bullied him into pushing her on the swings and replaced her with something dead, something cut open. So he had been wrong. They could still hurt him. She could, at least.

"Peppermint," he said. He closed his eyes. "But we told her. We told her and _told_ her. I know Lucas and Emily must have given her a _thousand_ Stranger Danger talks about taking candy, about being pulled out of a crowd. Cops tell their kids, we all do, always. Don't follow someone that wants you to help find their lost puppy. Don't believe someone that says your parents sent them to pick you up. And the candy thing. That's Kidnapping 101."

"She was just a child," Ducky said. Tony heard the sheet rustle back into place and knew that Ducky was trying to do him a favor, was trying to cover things up and make them pretty again, but it was too late for that. "Children don't always listen and no matter how close we watch them, we can't always keep them safe."

"But the peppermint," Tony said. "We must have told her so many times. She must have known. Why didn't she listen?"

Ducky touched his shoulder, fingers still cool, but Tony was past being helped by that.

"There aren't always answers, Tony," he said. "We never get to understand everything."

_But I want to_, he thought. _I want that_, and he knew then that he would take the job, no matter what strings Gibbs attached, because he thought Gibbs might be the one person to understand what he was thinking.


	15. Chapter XV

**Chapter XV**

The acrid smell of smoke was there to meet Gibbs as he opened the door. There was too much of it in the air, enough so that he could see it, and he shifted through the billowing clouds of pearly smoke to the kitchen. He saw the pan on the stove that kept blustering up in bright orange flame—he knocked a dishrag off Bryan Lacher's counter top and doubled it around his hand before sweeping the pan off the stove and into the sink. He turned the cold water on full force and now steam rose up, too. No smoke alarms were chirping in his ear, he noticed that now. What kind of father didn't install smoke alarms? What kind of man took that kind of a chance with his daughter?

_It's a long leap from a missing smoke alarm to a murdered child_, he told himself, but the knot of frustration stayed in his throat. He opened all the kitchen window and waited for the smoke to slowly roll out into the street.

Homemade French fries, scorched black. Ellie's favorite snack?

And no one had tended the stove.

He put his hand to his hip, sweeping back his jacket and laying his hand on his weapon. When he called out, the empty street swallowed up his voice along with the smoke.

"Lacher? It's Special Agent Gibbs. Your door was open." A lie, but not one that gave what was left of his conscience any kind of significant twinge—he forgave a little amateur breaking-and-entering when he could smell the smoke even from outside the house. "I need to ask you a few more questions, sir."

The house had no answer for him. He coughed out the smoke that had gotten into his chest and tried again.

"Colonel Lacher?"

He kept his hand at his hip as he made his way back through the house. It was wrong. Everything here was wrong, and not in the way that he had Tony had worried over—this silent house was wrong. The ghosts here, the disappearing curls of smoke, the scorched-out pan currently sending up white clouds of steam—these things were wrong, unwanted and unnecessary, and Gibbs suddenly wished that he could have seen Lacher play with Ellie here. Lacher, he remembered, was a widower, too. Gibbs knew that there was only so much one man could stand. And the bitterness of those two losses, to be tricked by time into believing that he would be able to keep his daughter and then only to lose her, barely a year later—

He checked the bedroom first. Part of him already knew.

Lacher had been practical. Not necessarily the most considerate suicide Gibbs had ever seen—the considerate ones usually chose the bathroom, because of how easily blood could be scrubbed off slick tile floors—but practical enough. Gibbs thought that maybe he just hadn't liked the idea of dying on the toilet. He had left his daughter's room alone, too, for the most part—he had taken her most ragged and well-loved teddy bear with him, but that was all. Then he had written his note, sat down on the edge of his bed, and pointed his service pistol at the roof of his mouth. And that was that. No flair and no fuss. The teddy bear sat next to him on the rumpled bedspread with a fleck of dried blood on its dark-glass left eye.

The note was brief enough. It was addressed to no one. Only two lines.

_I couldn't save Nancy. I couldn't save Ellie._

Two lines, both swollen full of heady loss and pain, but no confession. _I've never met anyone good enough to fake the zombie act_, Tony had said; that had been true, of course, but Gibbs had never known anyone to even approximate that kind of carved-out emptiness, and that was truer. Whatever had happened, whatever strings of fate had gotten tangled together, he was sure that Bryan Lacher had never laid a hand on his daughter or anyone else's. He might not have been the best father, but he had never been a bad one, let alone a nightmare. They had been moved back again, almost as far as they could go, and they had no answer for the Seconal, the peppermint, the Buttercream lotion, or the raw and unbridled insanity of those three dead and broken girls.

He would have to call Tony. He would have to start all of this over again and he had never wanted that, even at the cost of knowing that he was wrong, that a man he had trusted could have brutalized his own daughter that way—he had wanted so badly to just be done with it. He had wanted to salvage Tony from the wreck of this, so that, with time, he could think about Baltimore without seeing dead children and destroyed parents, without remembering the bruises on Tony's face and those late-night phone calls from dispatch, and think about it only as a place where he'd had a good find. But the longer this went on, the more time they had to look at those bloodstained photographs—the more he risked becoming nothing more than a reminder to Tony of bitter, hurtful days.

_I could leave. Ask Morrow to assign someone else._

He had never once bowed out of a case, in all his years at NCIS—and to leave a case like this one, one to which he had pinned so much anger and time, would be a marked departure from everything else he had never done. Morrow would assign someone else, he had no doubt of that—Morrow would do it simply because Gibbs had never asked him before. And even if his own team was shorthanded, there were other teams, even in other cities, if it came to that. There were other men and women who could burn out battering themselves against the impossibilities and uncertainties of this case. And he could spare Tony. He had a responsibility to try and do that, at least. He owed that to Tony.

And Ellie, Alex, and Marie? What did he owe to them? To their families? Even to Lucas Bayer, who doled out pain and judgment and blame from inside his perfect Italian suit? He had other responsibilities. He owed them, too.

He couldn't do it. He could never bend far enough. He wasn't that kind of man.

He would call in the body and he would do his job. Bastard. Oh, he knew it, too—knew it and had never denied it, but this was the first time that he had really wanted to. He was trapped, hemmed in from all sides by what he had always done and what he wanted to do now, and maybe he was just too old to change. Maybe, after all of these years, he had frozen in place. And something good would slip away from him again, and this case would always be hell, because that was all he deserved.

He took one more look at that suicide note, because he needed to believe in what he was doing, believe enough to see him through. _I couldn't save Nancy. I couldn't save Ellie._

_I couldn't save them_, Gibbs thought, _and I can't save Tony, either._

He had the phone to his ear before he even really heard it ringing. He swallowed past the numbness in his throat, knowing that it was Tony, knowing that he would have to twist the knife one more time to get them through this. It would hurt him, too. Good. But Tony spoke first and what he said cut through the haze sharper than any knife, and Gibbs knew that this was over, after all, though they hadn't quite been saved.

"It's not Lacher," Tony said. He sounded raspy, out of breath. "It's not Lacher, boss. I need you over here _now_."

They talked on the back porch, where the flat stone tiles with their embedded mosaics could pick up the sun and pattern Marcia Kelly's bathrobe like carnival glass. She still had not washed her hair and what had fallen from her ponytail lay in oily strings on the back of her neck. Tony was glad that her eyes had been swallowed up by oversized sunglasses—cheap plastic ones with a Disneyland logo clamped on one purple side—because he was sure that here eyes would be pink-rimmed and he didn't think he could stand to see another woman cry. He drew a line through the wet mark his glass of iced tea had left on the arm of the chair and said, "You're sure? You never met him?"

"I can't say that," Marcia said. Her lips trembled and she put a hand to her mouth. She had bitten the nail of her right index finger down almost to the quick. The ragged edge rested just against the scalloped edge of her upper lip. "I might have shaken his hand at a cocktail party, I might have poured him a drink, I might have met him chaperoning on a field trip." She cupped her hand now, pushing the frayed nail deeper into her lip. There wouldn't be any more field trips.

"Did your daughter ever come to these parties?"

Marcia nodded. "There were children's nights. We usually rented Disney movies for them and set them up in another room."

Tony thought about Alex Kelly clutching a pillow, watching _Beauty and the Beast_, while Bryan Lacher stood in the doorway, watching her. _Beauty and the Beast_. Oh, Jesus Christ. But that proved nothing at all, the swirl it created in his stomach didn't _mean_ anything. Marcia couldn't even verify that she knew Lacher, let alone that Lacher had met her daughter. There was the Seconal, of course—he hadn't forgotten that—but there was also the zombie act, the stiff and unresponsive way that Lacher had met them. The deadness of the man. There could be ways for a murderer to approximate grief, sure—Tony had seen that before—but not emptiness. Come on, not that.

_I couldn't even do that._

It _had_ to be Lacher, though—it had to be, because then it could be over. And Tony could see his way through to making it fit, surely. He could twist it and spin it and blur it until it seemed perfectly reasonable, until it wasn't even Lacher's _fault_ that he had done it, just the craziness left over from the loss of his wife, from the fighting overseas, from the tangle of signals in his brain. It would be bad but it would work. There was no elegance, no easy answer, but he could believe it. If he made himself believe it.

But that was Lucas's game, not his. And Tony's talent was fooling other people, not fooling himself.

And there were things _here _that still nagged at him, things that he hadn't even mentioned to Gibbs—the Buttercream lotion slicked on the skin of the latex gloves, the noises (_ghosts_) that Alex Kelly had heard at night, those photographs that Prestor had never handed over, Alex's caved in and bloodied face, and the peppermint—not the Seconal—that had lured Marie away from the swings and the slides of the playground. He couldn't shake these things; they were like splinters underneath his fingernails, painful and impossible to dislodge. He could only see them and worry at them until he was gnawed down to the quick, like Marcia Kelly. There was a connection that he was missing. There was something that he hadn't thought of, some invisible tie that bound together all of these little loose ends and produced some blood-soaked tapestry out of all of this. And when he figured it out, he could dismiss it, cut through the Gordian knot, have some reason why all these pretty little girls had to die in this bright and beautiful September—

_It's a nice day, Gibbs. Cool. Sunny. Coming into fall._

The time lapse on the film. Those apple blossoms that changed, all too quickly, to piles of dead and dying leaves.

_Something happened. Some catalyst. Some igniting spark._

Because Lacher and his daughter had lived alone for years and surely, _surely_, if some sickness had started to fester in Bryan Lacher's mind, it would have shown earlier on his daughter's skin. It would have started with a touch. There would have been suspicions, concerned teachers, physical evidence, latent reports of sullenness or terror, but none of that had surfaced. Under the naked and impassive lights of the morgue, Ellie Lacher had looked good, for a dead girl. Clean and well-fed, with nothing more than the usual childhood bruises and scrapes—until someone had come along and split her apart, touched their hands to her throat and pressed in, smearing Buttercream lotion on her skin in the process.

It must have taken more than the first signs of autumn to make her father lose his mind.

"Detective?"

He had been miles away. He touched the fresh condensation on the side of his glass and made himself smile at Marcia Kelly. "Mrs. Kelly. I'm sorry." The ice had dissolved into the drink; he had no idea how long he had been thinking. He looked at her now and tried to produce a second, better smile for this woman who deserved more than he could offer. The grief had worn her through, he knew that, he had no business slipping away right in front of her. She was empty, like Lacher—it was in the unwashed hair and the worn bathrobe, in the bitten-down nails and those cheap sunglasses. The sun wasn't even out anymore, the clouds had drained the whole world dark, but Marcia couldn't tell it. She still looked out at him from some better memory, some Florida escape where Alex had shaken hands with Mickey Mouse and she'd _needed_ the glasses badly enough to pay exorbitant theme park prices, because the sun was thick and golden and they had all been prepared to live forever in that glow.

Then something _pulled_ at his mind hard enough to throw him off-balance.

She had been making tea. He had interrupted her. She had met him at the door with a pitcher in her hand.

She'd been inside but she'd already had the sunglasses on when she met him, she hadn't put them on to take him out onto the porch.

There had been his own wide aviator sunglasses that Gibbs had seen straight through—_You might want to put some ice on that eye_—and his own glib response. _I'd have been more impressed if you'd told me to watch the bloody nose._ Because black eyes had staying power. Black eyes were obvious. And sunglasses when the sun wasn't out was a primitive disguise.

_We're on the back porch because she wanted an excuse. But then the clouds came out._

Tony's mouth was dust-dry. He said, "He hit you."

Her slender fingers tightened on her thighs and her frayed fingernails disappeared into the worn terrycloth of the robe. "I don't know what you mean."

"It wasn't the first time, either." He stood up and the blood rushed to his head, darkening his vision until Marcia narrowed to a pinprick of light at the end of a long tunnel. He was woozy. No. Not this. This was no better. "It wasn't the first time, because you know how to hide it. Make-up and sunglasses. He didn't hit Alex—we would have found that out by now—but he hit you. Hit you a lot. When you went to Dr. Mikell, when Rob was overseas, was it to try and figure out if you should leave him?"

She threw her glass of iced tea at him. The cold soaked through his shirt and into his skin; the glass tumbler shattered against the mosaic stones of the patio.

"Get out!" she screamed at him. The glasses had slipped down her nose and as she reached around for something else to hurl at him, one end slipped off until the sunglasses were dangling off one ear. Both her eyes were puffed up, the soot color of them hidden beneath uneven swatches of liquid makeup. A film of powder, too, had gathered on her cheekbone. Tony's own bruises ached, too. The tea was spreading up and down his shirt. He couldn't think about anything but the bruises and the cold, the oncoming rush of autumn, that flicker of the photographer's flash, and when Petty Officer Kelly had come home.

"Do you still love him? Is that why you didn't tell us?"

Kelly had returned from active duty a few weeks ago. The leaves were still on the trees but slowly changing to licks of flame. He'd hit his wife—he must have always hit her, beautiful and tattered Marcia Kelly with her heavy cover-up and her plastic sunglasses—but he'd doted on his daughter. Doted a little too much, maybe, on her budding breasts and her pink lips, but he hadn't touched her—Tony was as sure of that as he was of anything else. No, Kelly had saved all that hurt for Marcia and Marcia alone, all that violent and poisonous love—until _what_? Until _when_? What had made him snap?

A flowerpot smashed against his shoulder and dirt tumbled down the length of his body. Marcia Kelly was still screaming but she was crying now, too, and the knot of the belt on her robe had come undone and he could see the bruised nakedness of her. The air was rich with the smell of dying flowers, with the crumbling autumn leaves. He licked his lips and tasted that air, tasted the remnants of peach tea and the splash of crumbly potted soil. He went to her there at the end of the paved yard and knelt down. She had fallen and her knees were bleeding. She fell against him, striking out clumsily with her fists, and he held her as best he could. The wind picked up the dead and fallen leaves and swept them up. Tony picked them from her hair. He tried again to tie her robe closed.

She looked at him with swollen and dark eyes, no longer sobbing but still with fresh tears on the face. "Alex told him about the ghosts she heard at night. He thought what you thought. What Agent Gibbs thought."

"That you had an affair." He tucked the robe in around her, hiding the last of most private bruises and hurts.

She nodded and sucked in a breath. "And he said—once a whore, always a whore. So Alex probably wasn't his daughter."

The other girls had been strangled but Alex Kelly had had her head smashed in. He had ruined her pretty hair. Had left bloodstains on her face.

_He found her attractive_, Tony had said, looking down at the little body on the hiking trail. _He wouldn't have wanted to ruin her face. Why would he start making it messy?_

"She looked like you," he said. "She didn't look like him, she looked like you."

She hadn't been his daughter, he'd thought, so it must have all right for him to do what he did to her, out in the dead leaves with the Seconal making her little arms and legs slack and yielding. He had done it all there until he had looked at her and seen just his wife in her face. How he must have hated her. How he must have hated them both. He'd smashed her up, changed his MO when he had been so careful before—but _why_ before, why Ellie and why Marie?—because he had lost his temper.

_He lost his temper a lot, didn't he, Marcia?_

"Where is he?" he said. It was hard for him to talk. _Daddy, _she must have said. _Daddy, what is it? What are you doing? _"Where is he and when is he coming back?"

She wiped a hand across her eyes and nose. What was left of her tears lay on her face in a sheen. "He went out to get a newspaper," she said. "He wanted to see what you were doing. He'll be back any minute. He only left because they kept playing that interview on the news. That man who lost his daughter. They kept showing it. So he said he'd go get a paper to see how smug Detective Bayer looked _now_. He'll be back any minute."

She looked off over the neatly-combed backyard. The wind twitched one of the rubber swings back and forth.

"I think he'll kill me soon," she said. "I want him to."

She stood and went away from him. As he watched, she sat down in the swing that had been moving and pushed herself back and forth, back and forth. The robe rose up over her shins. Back and forth. Gently, gently. The way she would have pushed a child. Whatever he could have done for her here was already done and he didn't think that he could save her—he had never trusted himself enough to try and save any woman, let alone one so badly broken as Marcia Kelly—and so he did the only thing that was left to him.

"It's not Lacher," he said to Gibbs, aware that the phone was in his hand but not sure, not really, of how he had come by it or how he had dialed. "It's not Lacher, boss. I need you over here _now_."


	16. Chapter XVI

**Chapter XVI**

He had done this for his mother before. Not even ten years old, hardly out of those ridiculous navy-trimmed sailor suits, and Tony Dinozzo had known how to hush things up. How to hide any number of sins beneath silk bathrobes and fresh make-up and pick-me-up screwdrivers. Marcia Kelly was easier to manage than his mother had been—she wasn't drunk, she wept less, and he finally had arms strong enough to genuinely support her—but even so, he was still soaked up to his elbows by the time he had maneuvered her into the bathtub. Her wedding ring was loose. She worked at it under the water. Her eyes were glassy, disinterested.

He had wanted her to leave the house but she had refused and there had been little enough he could do by himself, he couldn't force her. He would have to stop Kelly at the door. He had the advantage. He was the one with the gun, after all, and even without it, he knew plenty of other ways to hurt. Of course, Kelly wasn't a run-of-the-mill psychotic, either. He was Navy. Spotless record. He would know ways to hurt, too, even beyond what he had done to the girls.

He would have back-up, though. He would have Gibbs. Or, more likely, he wouldn't have Gibbs but Gibbs would have him, which was fair enough, at least. He hung the bathrobe up on the back of the bathroom door and straightened the unraveling cuffs. He thought, _You had me at hello_, and some sound, not quite a laugh, escaped his throat. He sort of thought that he might be losing it, and that wasn't good, not when Marcia and Gibbs might need him. He took in a deep breath and curled his hands into fists, relaxed them, curled them, relaxed them.

"You have to understand," he said to Marcia, "the circumstances are kind of fucked-up." He thought that she could probably appreciate that. He looked at her in the mirror. She had her head back against a pearl-colored, seashell-shaped inflatable pillow wedged against the wall. She did not seem to be listening. That was okay. Tony never needed much of an audience. "We should have more back-up here. I mean, not that we'd ordinarily have the SWAT team surrounding the place—no point in giving your husband a warning and enough time to run—but we'd have a team, at least. But Gibbs is the only NCIS agent in Baltimore right now and there's not a cop in the whole city who would watch my back right now. The only one I could've gotten would be much more into shooting your husband than taking him in, and way more into shooting me than helping me out. So it's just me. And Gibbs. When he gets here."

She lifted one bruise-mottled arm out of the water and moved a bar of soap down it. She wriggled her fingers again and the ring came off with a slight splash. She nudged it far away from her with one toe and looked at him.

"I got it off," she said. "I thought I could." She reached down into the water, beneath the film of soap-scum, and fished the ring up again to place it among the shampoo bottles balanced on the rim of the tub. "They're real diamonds, you know. I had them checked once. The first time he hit me. I thought that if they were real, then he loved me, you wouldn't buy real diamonds for anyone you didn't love. So I stayed."

She grabbed at the ring again, knocking over the bottles now in the process, and threw it as hard as she could against the wall. Two hectic spots of red appeared high on her cheekbones.

"I could have gotten out," she said. "I could have saved her."

Tony sat down on the rug at the edge of the tub, his legs sprawled out so that his toes nudged against the leaking shampoo bottles. One of them was No Tears. Alex's? "Not many people get saved," he said. "So the odds were against you." She wouldn't have believed him if he had told her anything else. He began to line the shampoo bottles up on the floor.

Marcia found the soap again and started to wash her face. "You'll hear him when he opens the garage door," she said. "It shakes the whole house."

"Thanks," he said. "You want the shampoo?"

She took a peach-scented bottle from the pile. For a second, her fingers grazed against his and she flinched; he thought that she would realize that they had fallen off the ordinary curve of the world and gotten lost: a homicide detective sitting on a damp bathroom mat, listening intently for the sound of an opening garage door, and handing shampoo to a naked, grieving mother in her bathtub. But she drew back quickly and he knew then that it was only that she had remembered her husband and what hurt even the most ordinary touch could mean. He tilted his head back against the slick tile of the wall. He shouldn't stay in the bathroom with her, he knew that, but he hadn't lost the idea of her opening her wrists with a razor while he waited in the living room for Gibbs, so there he was.

"You've done this before," she said, with no real interest. Her eyes still hadn't really touched him; she hadn't really seen him since they had been outside, hurling flowerpots and accusations. She was too far gone for that.

He turned his head to look at the wedding ring on the floor next to the toilet and thought about what she had said about how real diamonds surely had to be almost equal to real love, and he opened his mouth to tell her that his mother had thought that, too. And when she had been proven wrong time and time again, she had just bought more diamonds, bought diamonds and booze and glamour dresses, while Tony kept trying to fix her up, get her into the bathtub, get her aspirin, get her pretty again so she wouldn't upset the maids. His mother hated making a scene.

He got as far as, "My mother—" when he heard the creak and rattle of the garage door.

He was on his feet in a second, almost losing his balance on the slippery floor, and told her to stay quiet and to for God's sake lock the door behind him until he told her that it was safe. Kelly had come and Gibbs had not; he would have to do this alone.

He went out into the foyer. A brief image of how ridiculous he must look, with his soapsuds and his potted soil and his tea-stains, surfaced in his mind and threatened to knock him off-balance, get him confused enough to let go, get him on that other slant of the world again—the place where it had been okay, or maybe even a good idea, for him to sit in the bathroom with Marcia Kelly—but he fought it back. He had to be here, right now. He had to know what he was doing. Had to get his head out of his ass, as Gibbs might say, or as he wanted Gibbs to say, and those two things were close enough for the difference not to matter, not right now.

_I need you, Gibbs_, he thought—he, who had tried so hard never to need anybody in his life—_I need you because I'm not sure if I can do this right by myself. I might do something I regret. _And he might, because he had Marcia's dried tears among the rest of the debris on his shirt, and because he had loved Marie Bayer and now she was dead.

Kelly came in through the back door and called out. His voice—such a calculated scam, something Tony knew how to do himself, and why hadn't he realized it?—was falsely warm, falsely weary, falsely honey-sweet. "Marcia, there's a car in the driveway, is it Janie?"

But he knew. He had to know. He had seen Tony's car before, after all, and he'd remember.

Tony could see him now and could see that Kelly had something clutched in his hand—the newspaper, the print blurry with sweat—_how smug Detective Bayer looked_—and anger tightened up his throat. Lucas had been an asshole, sure, Lucas had always been an asshole, but Tony had loved him, too, and he hadn't deserved this anymore than Marie had deserved this, or Alex, or Ellie, or Marcia, or any of them. And while that anger was fresh in him, along with the sight of the bruises on Marcia's skin, he pushed forward and moved too quickly, too horribly quickly—

"Detective Dinozzo," Kelly said. He was smiling. The newspaper was tented over his hand.

There was a sharp cracking sound and then heat bloomed underneath Tony's fingers. He was aware that he was holding his gun hand to his left shoulder, where there was sudden blood and pain mixed in with the burning heat of the bullet, and he knew without really seeing it that Kelly had fired at him from underneath the fold of the newspaper tent. So stupid. So stupid. He pulled his right hand away—fresh blood on his fingers, but no time to think about it—and reached for his own gun, but there wasn't enough time, he knew that. There wouldn't be enough time. Kelly had killed before but Tony had never been _shot_ before and he had _that_ inexperience to grapple with—and then there was another noise, then, impossibly loud, and he thought that he must have fired first, after all, so that was all right. So that was just fine.

Things were getting dark and fuzzy around the corners of his vision, but he thought he saw Kelly fall to the floor, his hands curled around one bleeding thigh.

_Shot_. His brain managed the word now, for Kelly and for himself, and he stumbled back against the wall, no doubt leaving a smear of blood on the tasteful paint.

Then Gibbs was there, solid and surprisingly gentle, moving him down so that he could sit with his back against the wall, putting two fingers to his throat to feel the blood beat underneath his skin. He was talking, too, first to Tony and then to either dispatch or 911, and the stream of words got mixed up inside Tony's head until it all blended into one thing, officer-down and good-job and gunshot and stay-with-me.

Tony's head lolled on his neck and he thought about how Marcia Kelly had floated in the bathtub with that pearly seashell pillow, working her wedding ring off and telling him to listen to the garage door so he would know when to be careful. He had told her to lock the door. He would have to tell her that it was safe now, he would have to go to the door and tell her that the world was just a little better, just a little, and even if it still wasn't safe enough to come out of the bathroom, it was the best that they could do for each other. He wanted to tell her because she had been naked and bruised, just like her daughter, and he wanted to save her even though so few people ever got saved. But Gibbs's hand was still on his, and Gibbs was warm and he was cold, and he was floating now just as much as Marcia had been, and he couldn't talk at all.

The second time Gibbs pressed the clean towel against Tony's shoulder, Tony flinched backwards and made a small noise in the back of his throat. It wasn't much—somewhere between a whimper and a cut-off sob—but it was enough to make Gibbs wish that he had put a bullet in more than just Kelly's leg. At first he had thought that Tony had been damn lucky to catch the bullet in his shoulder and not in his heart, but now, judging by the rapid way the towel was changing from white to red, he thought that Tony might not have been so lucky after all. The bullet must have nicked an artery.

He concentrated on pushing down hard on the wound, trying to ignore the uneven breathing that rasped out of Tony when he did, and went back to counting seconds in his head. Where was the damn ambulance? It was hard to be too patient when he could feel the heat of fresh blood beneath the heel of his hand; hard to be patient when he remembered the lightning bolt of fear that had gone through him when he had thrown open the door and seen Tony cupping a hand over his shoulder when he should have been reaching for his gun. Kelly was faster. Maybe five seconds of shaved time dodging traffic—that had been the difference between Kelly being on the floor and Tony down with a double-tap to the heart.

He should have been here sooner; he shouldn't have let Tony take a bullet in the first place.

He checked Tony's pulse with his spare hand again; it was thready but still there. Then, even though he didn't want to, he said, "He still alive?"

Marcia Kelly, bruised and damp and wearing nothing more than a dirt-stained bathrobe, did not look up to meet his eyes, but her hand was still steady on the towel that they had pressed against Kelly's bleeding thigh. "Still here. Maybe you should have shot higher."

"You bitch," Kelly said. He was breathing in and out through his teeth. Unlike Tony, he hadn't lost enough blood to fade in and out of consciousness yet, but Gibbs could tell that Marcia's bruising grip on his wound had at least, until now, succeeded in shutting him up so that he could bite back the pain. "You _bitch_. You _whore_. Did you fuck Dinozzo, too? Your knight in shining armor? Toss him a quickie so he'd keep coming around? But I took care of that."

Marcia didn't say anything. Her long blonde hair, three shades darker from the water, hung down in a curtain over her face and made her expression unreadable.

Finally, she said, "He helped me."

"He's _dying_," Kelly said, hard and bright with glee. "Isn't he, Gibbs?"

"Not before you."

He meant that, too, because he refused to go through all of this for _nothing_; he wouldn't let it end with Tony's blood drying tacky on the linoleum floor while Kelly lived. He screwed up his hand against Tony's shoulder again, even harder this time, and went back to talking, even if he was pretty sure that Tony had stopped listening a while back. That was fair. He wasn't listening to himself either. It was all rote, anyway, just scolds and reassurances whipped together to make up a litany that was probably more decorative than useful—Gibbs knew it by heart, though, he had practiced it enough on men with shrapnel studding their flesh and black powder stains on their faces. Tony looked sort of like that, with the bruises and the harsh breathing, with the bloodstained towel, with the way he had needed Gibbs to tell him, over and over again, that he was shot, that he was still breathing, that he was still there.

He knew the words by heart but he still slipped on them anyway, like fumbling over rosary beads, and when he said what he said next he kept his voice low enough that no one else could hear. "I've never lost an agent and you sure as _hell_ aren't going to be the first."

He heard the squeal of the ambulance sirens outside and he closed his eyes—_tired, tired, and maybe I'm just getting old_—and tried to pretend that this was all routine and not a bloodbath. He would have to tell them about Lacher, too—Lacher, who had blown his brains out rather than face a world that made this little sense, that was this callously unfair. Gibbs knew something about unfair, about stupidity, and about how quickly things could disappear—bang and then gone—so when they asked him if he wanted to ride with Tony, he said yes.

In the ambulance, Tony's hand was cool underneath the clotting blood and Gibbs pressed his thumb against the knuckles, against the fingers, trying to get him warm again.


	17. Chapter XVII

**Chapter XVII**

The sterile air in the hospital, tinged with the faint smells of antiseptic and fresh sheets, was the first thing Tony noticed when he resurfaced. His own apartment trapped scents inside and always, _always_ there was the lingering aroma of takeout pizza or thick dust; women's houses usually had their own scents, like candles or cotton, sticky perfume, and so he knew—unfortunately—that this careful non-scent meant that he was somewhere else, somewhere not as good. The pain in his shoulder had faded to a dull numbness, held back by the slim IV line running to the inside of his elbow. Somewhere, in the far distance, fuzzed out by too many doors and too much volume control, he could hear a game-show playing. Bob Barker.

He opened his eyes and saw Pete lounging in the plastic chair at the side of his bed. He was reading a Philip K. Dick novel with a cracked spine. He squinted and made out the title.

"Funny," he said, his voice an impossibly dry croak, "I was just dreaming of electric sheep."

Pete dropped the book on the floor. He curled his smile into his usual scowl quickly enough, but before he did, Tony saw that it had been surprised and almost sort of joyful—and that was good to know, even if Pete had tamped down it pretty quickly.

"I've seen the Playboy calendar in your desk drawer, Tony. I think there's only one thing you ever dream about." He poured Tony a cup of water and handed it to him. "Here. You sound worse than Darth Vader. It's going to spoil the mood."

The water was wonderfully cold. "So what's my damage?"

"Never an easy question to answer," Pete said. His scowl flattened a little, turned into more of a genuine frown. "You got shot, which I'm fairly sure made an impression even on you, and which _really_ pissed me off, because I expressly told Agent Gibbs to make sure that _didn't_ happen. You haven't been out for long, though, and they stopped freaking out about you dying a couple of hours ago. You'll be fine."

"Gibbs?"

"Interrogating the guy who shot you." Pete settled back into his chair. "He's not exactly what you'd call well-adjusted, is he?"

"Whereas you, of course, are the poster child for mental health," Tony said.

Pete held up his hands. "I'm not complaining about it. He called me. That's a definite improvement over Lucas."

Tony sipped at the water again. His head was still regrettably fuzzy, almost stuffed with cotton, and he wasn't sure whether to blame it on the drugs or the blood loss. He scratched absently at the IV line. "Pete, you want to go ask one of the nurses what they've got going into me here?"

"No."

"Can I ask why not?"

"Because I know you. And if they tell you, you'll start trying to figure out whether or not you actually need it, and you'll probably decide that you don't, and I don't want you ripping out your IV line and going AMA." He picked up the paperback off the floor and bent it back and forth, adding a few more creases to the already damaged spine. "And because you owe me a favor. I was just about to finish off the last of the honey-dust when I got Gibbs's call."

"Quite the sacrifice," Tony said.

"Not so much," Pete said, "when they thought you might be dying." He reached out and took a long drink of Tony's water. "Gibbs stayed here until they were sure you were okay. He's all right. Not much in the interpersonal relationships department, and a little prone to yelling, but he stuck with you. And he called me. He likes you. I think it'll be okay."

"I never said I was leaving."

"Tony. You'd have to be crazy to stay here."

"Yeah," he said. "Maybe that's true. But I'll miss you." He thought that he had to be careful there—that he had to thread the needle—because he had never been good at saying what he really meant straight out. He would've preferred to say something else, almost anything else, but that was the only thing that he really needed to get across to Pete, the only sentence in two years of tangled conversations that really mattered. It was important, and he didn't want Pete to misunderstand.

One corner of Pete's mouth slanted upwards. "Of course you'll miss me. I'm the only one who listens when you do that this-reminds-me-of-a-movie shtick."

He was smiling again, but not as happily—this was a little softer, a little sadder, and Tony thought that he _did_ understand, after all. That was good. Because he _would_ miss Pete, for the movie shtick and for everything else—because if he had been floating before, this was like finally stepping onto dry land again.

"So everybody was right. You got that cushy federal job after all. So it's _Special Agent_ Dinozzo now. For two years, at least."

Even without looking, Tony would have known him. It may have gotten tattered in the last few days, but Lucas's voice had always been velvet-smooth. It could be warm sometimes, and soft as well as smooth, but Tony had the feeling that those days had long passed, that whatever good there had been between him and Lucas had died even before Gibbs had come around. Somewhere along the line, back when they had still been pitting Tony against suicide attempts and reporters, back when they had decided that he was a better pretty face than he was a cop, Lucas had left him and Tony had never gotten him back.

He didn't have him now, either, though Lucas was right in the room with him—not in one of his suits but just in jeans and an old Orioles tee-shirt, looking battered but still—in some stamp that could never be beaten off his face, even though Rob Kelly had tried—smug.

Tony heard Pete curse under his breath and knew that he was supposed to be mad, too, that Lucas was intruding on something that was none of his business, that Lucas had no right, but he was more tired than angry. However much sleep he had gotten under that filmy water of unconsciousness hadn't been enough. He wanted to sleep and he wanted to shower, he wanted to scrub all these shadows off his skin, and then he wanted at least one night where the most he had to consider was a woman, and not a woman like Marcia Kelly, who needed him, but just one who wanted him. Just something brief. He wanted those things but he didn't want Lucas, not really, not now, not anymore. He had Gibbs and maybe Ducky and Abby, too; he had Pete. That was enough.

But somewhere, dulled and weakened underneath his weariness and the heartbeat of his anger (_I loved her too, you son-of-a-bitch_), he still loved Lucas, and so he said, "That's right. For two years, at least. What are you doing here, Lucas?"

"Heard you got shot," Lucas said simply. "I wanted to see it for myself."

"How endearingly disturbing," Pete said. "Get out of here, Lucas. You already hit him once."

Lucas let out a chuff of air that was almost a laugh. "What, Woley, and one time is supposed to pay for all? My daughter's _dead_."

"I know that, and I'm sorry, but this isn't your show anymore."

"No," Lucas said, still looking at Tony. "No, I guess it isn't. And you got him eventually. Does it bother you that we might have gotten him sooner? How many wild-goose chases did Gibbs take you on? How many wrong turns? Do you wonder if we could have saved her?"

And that was where Lucas had him, where Lucas would _always_ have him, because Tony knew that he could have solved it sooner, that Alex had died before Marie and that the pieces—at least most of them—had been there before Lucas's disastrous interview and Kelly's response. Yeah. It bothered him that he might have saved her. That he hadn't been smart enough, or good enough, or quick enough to do that. That he had loved her and she was dead and he could have stopped it. But he couldn't have stopped it with Lucas and that was the one thing that Lucas didn't understand, that Lucas would maybe never understand. And if he didn't understand that, Tony didn't know why he should waste his time explaining anything else.

"Gibbs is better than you are," he said, "and I'm better with Gibbs, too."

Lucas's smile froze in place. "Then get _better_ soon, Tony, and get the hell out of here. Because if you stay one day longer than you have to, I can't guarantee that anyone's going to come when you call for backup. I hope they don't." It wasn't a taunt, Tony understood that instinctively, and it might not have even been a real threat—but beneath the words were Lucas's anger and Lucas's hurt, the remains of their spoiled and gone-sour friendship, and it was, at least, a wish. And sincere.

Lucas touched two fingers to his right eyebrow in an improvised salute.

"I hope it's worth it," he said. And then he left.

Pete poured him another glass of water. His hand was shaking. "Don't listen to him. He's an asshole. You didn't do anything wrong."

Tony took the water and didn't say anything, because there was so little he was sure of.

"You're a lot better than Lucas," Pete said. "You're a lot better than anyone else I know." Then he did something he had never done before—he leaned forward, just briefly, and squeezed Tony's shoulder. Just once. Just for a second. Then things moved back into place, and moved on.

Gibbs had conducted interrogations in hospital rooms before, but he hadn't done it often, and _this _interrogation, with Rob Kelly handcuffed to his hospital bed and smiling a slightly drug-fuzzed smile, unnerved him.

He was uncomfortable with the background noises, with the whines and beeps of the machines; uncomfortable, too, with the fact that Tony was somewhere on this same floor. Being uncomfortable made him angry and being angry made him wish that there was a wall to batter in, a lawyer at least, but Kelly had waived his rights and simply lay there, placidly answering questions, leaving nothing for Gibbs to fight. He set up the tape recorder to catch the simple, poisonous answers; that was all. No tricks.

From Alex's confession of hearing the noises at night to Kelly's assumption that his wife had been having an affair, there was a straight and unbroken line; Gibbs had followed that same path himself. Kelly even confessed to beating Marcia—"Sometimes I'd lose my temper"—and relayed the scene that had taken place between them when he had first accused her. The scene had resulted in a chipped tooth, a damaged kidney, and another set of black eyes. He had wanted to kill her but he knew that that would be tricky, that they would see the bruises, that the neighbors would talk, that the husband was always the first suspect. He wanted to kill her but even more than that, he wanted to kill Alex, pretty little Alex, who looked so much like her mother and nothing like her father. He'd gone over it again and again. Who _did_ she look like? Did he know? Had he met his wife's lover? He had kept his outbursts to Marcia but he had started to focus all of his real hatred on Alex, the girl that he thought represented the culmination of his wife's affair, the girl who was both his cheating wife and her lover. The girl that could take all the punishment he wanted to deliver to both wife and unknown lover.

His confession was smooth, untouched by any regret. He was angry, but even the anger seemed a little distant, now. He seemed _content_. Self-satisfied. And why not? Hadn't he broken his wife well enough, in the end?

"But why Ellie Lacher?"

He would start there. He had to start asking why and he had to start somewhere, because he had the feeling that there were many whys that Kelly didn't know. Why had he started beating his wife? Why had he thought that it would be right or reasonable to do what he had done? Gibbs had been in the game a long time. He knew these questions didn't have any answers. Not with men like Rob Kelly.

"I needed a distraction. Something where you couldn't see the forest for the trees. And I knew that Lacher had trouble sleeping, knew about that occasional little habit of his. The whole _base_ knew. Some guys just can't handle it."

Something clicked into place. "You got the Seconal from him."

"Something nice," Kelly said. "For his daughter. Too bad I ran out before Marie. I told him that I had trouble, too, that I couldn't take it. Insomnia." He smiled. "Problems with my wife. He ate it up. Brought me the reds the very next day."

"And you killed his daughter," Gibbs said.

Kelly shrugged. "He was a junkie and his wife was dead. He wasn't going to win any father-of-the-year awards. I think I did the little girl a favor." But his voice slanted a little at the end and Gibbs knew that it hadn't been about doing Ellie Lacher a favor, that it hadn't been about Bryan Lacher himself, or even confusing the investigation by producing a forest instead of a single isolated tree. It had been about obsession. It was the way he lingered over the words "little girl," the way he looked down when he smiled then, as if laughing over some private joke. Revenge had just been an excuse, not a motive. It had just been empty justification, something to plaster over his actions to hold them together when the case finally made it to court. He had done this because he had wanted to. No other reason.

Kelly looked up at him for a moment, his serene mask flickered and Gibbs saw something uneasy underneath it, some ripple in the waters. Maybe Kelly knew that Gibbs could see straight through him. Then the plastic pulled back into place and his smile became wider.

"You probably want to know about Marie Bayer, too."

"No," Gibbs said. "We figured that out."

"Smart man."

"I'm more interested in Max Prestor, your little peeping-tom and hired photographer."

"That's a much more boring story," Kelly said. "I just needed one more thing that wouldn't point to me. Prestor's little photography fetish is a matter of public record. And I even remember when it happened. Marcia started making sure all the curtains were closed at night. I gift-wrapped him for you. Prestor's photographs and those drugs that went back to Lacher. You didn't have anything."

"We had the lotion," Gibbs said. "That Buttercream lotion your daughter loved. The one you put on your gloves before you killed her. That wasn't all part of your little forest, was it?" He leaned over the hospital bed and put his hand on the railing only an inch from the steel cuff that locked Kelly in place. "Now why would a guy as smart as you go to all that trouble just to use something so distinctive? Something you had right in your house? Not the same bottle—bet you kept yours somewhere else, somewhere private, but definitely not the medicine cabinet—but the same lotion. I don't know, but I think I can make a guess."

Kelly's mouth tightened. "Guess away."

"We thought like you, that was the problem. We jumped to the same conclusions. When Dinozzo found that lotion, when your wife said that Alex had asked for it specifically, he thought the same thing you did. There had to be another man in the picture. Someone that Alex had gotten cozy with. Someone who wore that lotion. What do you think, Petty Officer? Did the guy your wife was doing on the side wear this? That's why you put it on. That wasn't some random splash. You wanted to incriminate him. Wanted us to find him for you. The ultimate revenge fantasy."

"But you didn't," Kelly said. His lips were tight, almost white, and the anger was back full-force. "You didn't find him, you weren't good enough."

"Good enough to find you."

Gibbs leaned even closer, his lips almost against Kelly's ear. "Your wife didn't have a lover."

"She _did_. I know she did."

"She didn't. And we checked Alex's DNA with yours. Perfect match."

Kelly turned his head to the side hard but Gibbs pulled up before they collided. "But the noises—"

"You paid that psychiatrist a lot of money. Maybe you should have asked him. Anxiety disorder. She was just scared because mommy was. Mommy was going to leave you, by the way. Too bad she didn't."

"The lotion—"

"Teacher, product placement, free sample, just grabbed it in the store. There are a dozen answers, a dozen things you never thought of. But hey, we didn't think about it either. We're used to assuming the worst, too. But you're the one that went all the way. Did she call you daddy when you killed her? Did she beg? Wouldn't have mattered. You would have done it anyway. You're not the hero. You're not even that smart. You're just one more _freak_, maybe a little worse than the last one that hit the headlines, maybe not. And they'll forget about you. And your wife, she's still here. Wonder who she'll marry while you're rotting in prison. Doesn't matter. You'll have other things on your mind. Do you know what they do to guys like you in prison, Kelly?"

Kelly was white now, dead-white. He had lost. Whatever fragile little patch those reasons and justifications had made over his mind had been too deeply stitched in to be torn away without damage. He hadn't like it when Gibbs had been able to see him and now he could see himself.

But that was cheap, oh God, that wasn't much. Not much at all.

Three dead daughters and one dead father, for no reason really but Kelly's own twisted mind.

Kelly was asking for him now and he sounded wheedling, sounded desperate, as if there might be a deal to make or if he had finally decided that he wanted a lawyer after all, but Gibbs didn't listen. He was done. He walked out and closed the door. Halfway down the hall, he could still hear Kelly calling for him, calling out for him, wanting absolution.

Gibbs had none of that to give, not for anyone, and his supply of kindness had always been sparse enough that there was little to go around. He couldn't waste any on Kelly. Not when there were other things he had to do.

He went to Tony's door and knocked before entering. Tony had a little more color now than he'd had three hours ago, when Gibbs had left him, and he was awake—the remains of laughter were fading from his face when Gibbs opened the door. He still remembered how to be human, then. That was good. And if he could bury or burn this quickly, that was all the better. That was what he told himself, at least, though some thought as sharp as a razor blade pressed into him and told him that no matter what, it wasn't good that Tony could come back this quickly, wasn't good that Tony was so proficient at burying or burning those ruined pieces of his heart, but he shook it off. He had to shake it off. He was the same way.

"Hey, Dinozzo," he said. "Woley."

"I hear we got the bad guy," Tony said. "And you shot him."

"Didn't have much of a choice."

"You don't hear me arguing about it." There was a small smile on his face still. "Pete, you mind? Just for a couple minutes? I'll give you money for the cafeteria."

Woley waved a hand. "If you're leaving, I'd better get in the habit of buying my own lunch." He tossed his book on the nightstand and nodded at Gibbs, who got the strange feeling that he was being given permission for something. "Anyway, maybe Abby's still around. You can pour your own water for a couple of hours, Tony. Agent Gibbs."

Then he was gone, too, and it was just the two of them.

Gibbs took Woley's place in the uncomfortable plastic chair. Damned things always made his back hurt. He wouldn't stay long.

"You're going to be on sick leave for a while and then on desk duty after that," Gibbs said. "My guess is that somewhere in there, you'll hand in your resignation letter. Don't imagine there'll be any question of them refusing to accept it."

"No," Tony said, with a small, cramped smile. "Probably not."

"So you resign," Gibbs said, "and you take some time off." That wasn't a question and he hoped Tony realized that; he would ask Tony one thing, but not everything, and not this. Not when he had seen how close Tony was to burning out. "Couple days, couple weeks, even. Then you should make your way over to DC."

"To see the Washington Monument," Tony said. "I always wanted that."

"The Monument's for tourists," Gibbs said. "I was thinking you could get an apartment."

"Sure. And maybe one of those plants you don't have to water a lot. Bamboo."

If Tony intended to be this irritating as a matter of course, Gibbs was going to have to cut into his paychecks to pay for more Scotch. But he knew what Tony wanted and it wasn't such a hard thing to do, not really. "You want to work for me or not, Dinozzo?"

Tony smiled. "Yeah," he said. "I do." But eventually his smile faded around the corners. "I'm going to remind you of this, aren't I? That's not such a good thing. You sure you want to hire someone that's just going to really be the souvenir from hell?"

No. Because he was good at getting rid of the things that didn't matter; good at carving away whatever he didn't absolutely need.

He didn't say that, though. He asked the question he needed to get the answer he already knew. "What about you?"

Tony shrugged. "There are a couple skeletons in my closet, boss, but I'm usually pretty good at locking the door. It's not much of a problem."

"Not a problem for me, either." Everyone carried their pasts around, it wasn't like they could help it. But he didn't have to examine his own too closely. If he were in the habit of doing that, he never would have gotten this far.

He had let go of worse things than this.

He wasn't good at forgiveness—because to forgive was to remember forever—but he was good at forgetting.

"Good," Tony said. He met Gibbs's eyes. "Because I wasn't trying to get out of taking the job. I want it. I just don't want it badly enough for you to screw you over."

He had never made a hire like this before; never chosen someone who wanted to work for _him _and not just for NCIS, for the feds, for the money.

"I never asked you to worry about me, Dinozzo," he said. "Three weeks. Anything more than that, don't bother showing up. Anything much less than that, don't bother expecting active duty." He thought that meant that Tony would probably get to DC in about two weeks and talk himself onto active duty after about two-and-a-half. That would be enough time. Enough time to forget, if not to forgive, most everything that had happened in Baltimore.

"Three weeks. Got it, boss. See you then."

Gibbs just nodded and patted the side of the bed before he left. There was, after all, no point in saying goodbye.

**THE END**

**Author's Notes:** Okay, if you stuck around for this long—through all of the tangles, interminably long waits, and hit-and-miss author response (thankfully, I'm on top of my game at the moment and I'll make sure to get back to everyone)—then I really, sincerely hope that you also enjoyed the ending. I'm planning a sequel tentatively called _The Third Day_, in which that botched undercover assignment Tony mentions a few times in _Rictus_ comes back to haunt him during current-era NCIS, but I've learned my lesson on writing novels: I'll finish it before I begin posting. Until then, I think I'll stick to one-shots for a while.

Once again, thank you so much for all of your comments, support, and _readership_. I couldn't have gotten through this without you.


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